Why I can never get along with anybody

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You made it very negative. Why?

How many Americans, accustomed to seeing Vietnam war vets homeless and suffering from PTSD, realize that the Viet Cong didn't get PTSD? I went to school in Stoney Creek, which has a battlefield park where Canada defeated the US. Any day in summer, you could hear Americans, recently allowed in at the border, saying "BattleofStoneyCreek - Oh yeah, we won that." Quite a few of them had brought their snow gear, assuming that Canada never melts at the same latitude as Oregon. I recently heard of someone flying SSE from northern Michigan to Toronto, and thinking they had flown north.
During the investigation into the Titanic, one US Congressman asked an expert witness on the stand why, if the ship had watertight compartments, the passengers had not been able to get into them as the ship sank.

Windsor Ontario is SOUTH of Detroit, Michigan.

I was stunned when I found that out, too.

My partner, who's English, didn't know what BCE meant either.

I had to Google that about 10 years ago. I grew up with BC, not BCE.

“Before Common Era” was a concession to people who aren’t Christian.

I live about an hour and a half from Detroit, it stuns a lot of people.

Everyone has gaps in their knowledge, because no one can be taught everything or retain everything, especially when it's not considered to be useful to the person at the time.
Giving examples here of what people don't know isn't to the point.
It's not the same as stubbornly believing things that are contrary to all evidence.

I didn’t know, until recently, that one usually must sand a surface before painting it.

I agree with the part about believing something contrary to the evidence staring you in the face.

In a recent discussion, we wanted an example of a stereotype and settled on the "American" (US) ignorance of geography, since they don't even seem embarrassed about it. Even Jay Leno has done street interviews about it to get laughs. It is quite ironic that the country that interferes with the world the most, keeping permanent military bases all over and exercising a veto on many other elections, is also the most ignorant about the world, and has the fewest passports per capita of any developed nation.

When plywood was first used in aircraft, there were quite a few crashes caused because people didn't know to sand it before applying glue. Then, they couldn't be trusted to sand the glue areas, so the whole sheets are now always sanded before further processing.

Exactly my point. I would expect folks to know BC,and NOT to know this new fangled BCE stuff. I only mentioned BCE as an afterthought to cover my bases. And just in case Joe was SO young that maybe BCE is what she knew. Which could explain why she didnt know from BC.

I thought for a long time that AD literally meant 'after death' i.e. After Christ's death, because teachers used that as a memory aid.

My eighth grade teacher knew what BC meant. And thinking aloud in front of class she ...decided right then and there that "AD" must mean "after death".

I accepted it, but thought that it didnt quite make sense. Christ died on the cross at like 33 years age. So it didnt make sense to me that there were thirty some years of history that were neither AD, nor BC. And it turned out that I was right. That AD starts right at his birth in the manger,when BC ends, and not with his adult crucifixion. There is no inane gap between the two sets of dates.

AD stands for Anno Domeni. Latin for "year of our lord".

I didn't know what BCE meant before this thread.

I would have been less negative but I thought you'd humiliate me again and tell me that that's an even simpler fact that everyone in the western world knows or "should" know. So that's why I felt ashamed to casually admit that I didn't know what BC stands for.

But as an atheist I am totally clueless about Jesus or anything to do with the Bible.

None of this trivia has anything to do with proving your point.

You would expect Americans to know their side of a war, and not about the enemy's pov. And that a 1912 lawmaker would be more versed in law than in naval architecture.

But an educated person who lives in a nation that has the Cross of St. George superimposed upon the cross of St. Andrew as its flag, and that has been a Christian culture for fifteen centuries, and has the Anglican sect named after it, would at least wonder at some point "what does BC stand for?", and have a parent or teacher explain that it means "before Christ" prompting her to realize that "Christ must have lived right after all of that stuff that was 'before Christ'".

I didnt ask her to know what BCE means. I asked her to know what BC means.

agreed