By BERN MORLEY
Sometimes in life, no matter how educated or street smart we are, we just miss stuff. Obvious stuff. Stuff that might seem completely and utterly obvious to the people around us, yet through upbringing or circumstance, we ourselves, fail to recognise.
I once worked with an extremely smart lady. An accountant that had somehow made it through her entire life thinking that a carpenter was someone that laid carpet. I am not even making that up.
And whilst it would be really easy to mock her for this, I didn’t. Well I did, just a little but not for very long because I knew I was guilty of exactly the same kind of cultural crime.
It’s called the ‘Knowledge gap’. And it happens to best of us.
It hurts, but maybe if we share we’ll all grow silently smarter and more knowledgeable together. Either that or we’ll just get to laugh and make fun of one another. Either way, it’s going to be really enlightening.
Let me give you some examples from “anonymous” sources:
1. Word Pronunciation.
“The word awry provided a moment of embarrassment when I was doing my best to impress the woman who is now my wife. I said “aww-ree”.
Quinoa. I, for one was pronouncing this ‘Quinn-oh-ah’ when really I should have been saying ‘Kee-no-wah’ I still maintain that I’m the correct one. Plus, who cares.
Epitome. “It wasn’t until I used this word at a major presentation and pronounced it as ‘epi-tome’, like ‘epi-home’ that I realised I was saying it wrong.” And let’s not forget that one time that Jessica Mauboy pronounced the word ‘début’ live at the Arias as ‘day-butt’.