Metafilter with well over 500 responses on wrongness:
What in life did it take you a surprisingly long time to realize you’ve been doing wrong all along?
I once cooked expertly with my rangetop stove, when I moved to the city of Kobe, something I frankly knew nothing about. The device was waiting for me in my village apartment when I arrived, so I did to it with food what it seemed wont to do, interpreting its icons as called for. Toast in one area, fish in another, mochi, and so on. I had it all worked out. I spoke of this phenomenon with pride until, abruptly, a Japanese friend pointed out I had juryrigged it beyond recognition. I was doing it all wrong. And badly.
Since 1995 — when it was sort of coined by an episode of This American Life (00:00-04:01) — it’s been fun to call out “Jackass Knowledge.” There’s a point in conversation, a point at which information begins to thin, to stretch, to bend, and you take that shred of information you read online, in the Times, or heard from a friend, and you stretch it beyond where it truly belongs. It often comes in the form of talks we get into on subjects like partially hydrogenated oil, the frontal cortex, sustainable coffee bean suppliers, and the pythagorean theorem. The trouble is when you have a little information, you can go to far. And then, you’re well, you know.
Interesting. One of the quotes that jumped out at me:
That weird Arby’s logo is stylized drawing of a cowboy hat.
I thought it was a fish jumping out of a loaf of bread until I actually went to one and discovered that there was a real dearth of fish on the menu.
I guess if I look hard, squint, and pretend I’ve never seen a cowboy hat and consider various species of whales to be fish, then I get it.
Still don’t see the loaf of bread…maybe the whale done smushed it. The mind is a mysterious place.
Jesus, however, is definitely in the HEB sign.
Lemkin 