20 Brains That Got the Short End of the Stick

Some people just don't have street smarts...or book smarts. Unfortunately this is just stuff you can never come back from.

By Nathan Johnson

Published 3 years ago in Facepalm

Some people just don't have street smarts...or book smarts. Unfortunately this is just stuff you can never come back from.

We've collected some of the most facepalm-worthy brain farts that people have ever experienced. I genuinely hope they're all doing okay in life. Because, damn.

1
A girl in my high school asked if Hitler was some sort of Nazi.

2
A coworker couldn’t figure out why Alaska was cold and Hawaii was hot, because “they’re next to each other on the map."

3
A guy I knew thought that human bones were made of wood.
4
I love a confidently incorrect correction. Once at school we were discussing Monet and how he had cataracts which affected the colors of his later paintings (they grew more and more orangey-brown over time.)

One girl raised her hand to ask what cataracts are, and her friend immediately interrupted to say “ugh you don’t know anything, it’s a kind of boat."

5
A sous chef who made more money than me, a line cook, sincerely thought leaving a lid on a pot makes bringing water to a boil go slower because it “holds the heat down." I will refrain from repeating the other very horrible things this person has said.
6
“How do dogs in China learn Chinese?” This person was under the assumption that dogs just naturally spoke English.
7
Wait, wait. Why have you been lying to me?! You said you were from Liverpool, not England!

8
In my freshman year of college, a biology professor started his semester with a speech about how science is how we explain everything in the modern world through experiments and peer review. A girl next to me had a smug look on her face and said, “If science can explain everything then why are people still doing experiments? Can’t science just explain it? I mean just read a book.”

It took me a while to realize her wisdom and then it took me even longer to hold down my laughter.
9
A girl in middle school thought that trees flapping created wind rather than the other way around.
10
Once when I took a class trip to Washington D.C. we went to a museum and saw a reenactment of something featuring George Washington on a big screen. While we were watching it I heard two girls from the front row. One of them asked the other, “Is this real footage?” And the other replied, “No, if it was real it would be in black and white.”

11
I used to work as a paralegal and had to fight with Social Security when they accused my clients of fraud. Got on a call with an agent who insisted my client was faking the disability her daughter had. The daughter died of the disability and it says it on the death certificate. The agent told me it wasn’t enough proof.
12
A woman in my office asked another woman if "The Martian” with Matt Damon was based on a true story and the other woman said she wasn’t sure.
13
My friend once thought Aloe Vera was some European model who was hired for every cosmetic commercial because they would always say the product name and then “with aloe vera” as they showed models in the back dancing or washing their face or whatever. He thought she was one of them.

I believe the direct quote was something to the effect of “it’s crazy how she gets hired for literally every single commercial."

14
Why Mexico’s Independence Day isn’t the same as the U.S.
15
One of my best friends was convinced that Sweden and Finland were the same country, and that Iceland didn’t exist.
16
A professor at Belmont once told me that cars could never run on electricity, because there are no electric components of a car. I wasn’t sure where to go from there.

17
It’s not the clouds that are moving. It’s the Earth.
18
A flight was delayed due to snow on the runway, a woman complained saying "This happens every year, why don’t they put a roof over the runway or something?”
19
Friend: “I’ve always wondered how goats grow into deer in the wild, but stay goats at the farm.”

Me: “Ayo what the f**k?”

Friend: “I know. Crazy, right? With ponies at least you can see them grow into horses, but the goats?"