Once upon a time a friend and I drank in a bar and meet a man who said that “everything was Asia” with the exception of a few select countries. Today I learned that old drunk Dutch men are not the only people who have trouble with geography… did you know that:
Mexico is not part of North America or South America. (To be fair we asked if they thought it was part of Central America and they were able to correctly state that Central America is not a separate continent…) They connected Mexico with Spain and correctly stated that Mexico couldn’t be part of Europe (though their reasoning was that it was larger than Europe and thus couldn’t be part of that continent…) In the end we never were able to decipher who they believed Mexico belonged to, but I think I finally got him to understand that Mexico is part of North America.
However, (oh yes, there is still a however) one of the arguments he continued to lobby against Mexico being a part of North America is that it is not ‘civilized’ because you cannot drink the water. To which another student piped-up “What about Canada?” thinking that Canada was not civilized either (as she explained: it has moose) and knowing it is a part of North America would render the idea that only civilized nations are part of the North American continent.
I hope that he plans on never venturing farther than necessary throughout his life.
I just read your newest entries and all I can say is that I weep for the future. I learned how to spell Mississippi when I was in grade school because it was a long word and if you knew how to spell it then you were smart.
ReplyDeleteI will add that one of Anne's ex-coworkers didn't get the concept of Canada being a different country. She simply couldn't grasp that a piece of mail going to Canada had to be shipped internationally.
Yikes!