Real life "Eskimos Aren't Real" stories?

This is exclusive to the US because Cold War reasons: someone at my school didn't know human spaceflight exist.

Just remembered one - as a kid, I didn't know bed bugs existed outside of the saying "good night, sleep tight, don't let the bed bugs bite". My mental image of them was also much cuter, needless to say.

I didn't know there was a real Colonel Sanders for a long time, I'd just thought he was a fast food mascot.

I thought dire wolves were fictional.

Turns out that they were real.

The first time I heard of a TOW Missile was from the Futurama that introduced the homicidal robot Santa - specifically the line "Your mistletoe is no match for my TOW missile"... So I assumed it was something the writers made up for the sake of that joke.

edited 25th Apr '15 5:32:43 PM by MikeK

I thought as a little kid that Brimstone was some kind of made up rock, rather than another name for sulfur.

In a related matter, when I first heard "burglarize", it was on The Simpsons and spoken by Ned, so I thought it was a Flanderism rather than the actual American English for "burgle".

edited 14th May '15 8:25:44 AM by Bisected8

Granted, no one really uses that word in America either.

Middle school, English class, early 70s. The usual "garbageman/sanitation engineer", "prison/correctional facility" discussion. I said "barber/tonsorial technician". Teacher thinks this is a reference to tonsils. I tell her it means "to do with hair" and it's in the dictionary. Teacher says it's not a real word, refuses to look it up. An English teacher refusing to use a dictionary. Right.

I once did this myself by forgetting there actually was a President called Chester A. Arthur and challenging my classmate to prove he hadn't made that one up.

edited 15th May '15 1:45:05 PM by CaptEquinox

I’m just old enough to remember commercials he appeared in. Even then, I thought he was actually an actor playing a character made up to sell a product. And yet, I thought Betty Crocker was a real person.

Also, similar to the “snickerdoodle” example above, when I first heard of apple pie with cheese, I originally thought, “They mean, like, cream cheese, right? They can’t mean, you know, Cheddar or something like that!” And when I heard about chicken and waffles, I thought, “They don’t actually put syrup on the chicken, right?

Conclusion: some people like really gross food combinations.

edited 15th May '15 7:20:47 PM by Bananaquit

Someone Asked me about how the Germans won world war 2 and asked for my help and I just didn't respond because my dumbass meter went into overdrive

A few years ago, my engineering class had a big debate over whether trebuchets exist.

One girl in our class ion eastern culture said isn't anime like the worst tv show ever and half of the claw broke out into laughter

So you're saying that the whole class laughed at a girl who didn't like anime? Cause that's what I'm getting from that clunky sentence.

I got the impression the girl thought animé was a television show, as opposed to an art style/genre.

I got the impression she was probably not being serious, which flew over that poster's head.

I knew someone, once, who insisted that Montana was not provably a real place as he had never met anyone who had been there.

You know that huge ass bug from The Legend Of Zelda Twilight Princess you had to fight as Wolf Link?

There's a sea crustacean that looks EXACTLY like it.

It still counts because I didn't think it existed until I accidentally saw a picture for it one time.

edited 26th May '15 10:56:30 PM by PrincessGwen

I think that's more Aluminum Christmas Trees than anything.

edited 26th May '15 10:48:07 PM by BaconManiac5000

I didn't know that sea creatures could look like programming errors.

Up until about a minute ago I thought electrum was something Dungeons And Dragons made up

I once knew someone who thought Africa was a country and Maghreb was its capital.

Maghreb?

Was that person related to Seth MacFarlane?

Basically the name for the area commonly called the Barbary Coast, basically North West Africa. Inhabited by the people commonly referred to as Berbers.