See title. For those who don’t know, the Mandela Effect is a phenomenon where a large group of people remember something differently than how it occurred. It’s named after Nelson Mandela because a significant number of people remembered him dying in prison in the 1980s, even though he actually passed away in 2013.
I’m curious to hear about your personal experiences with this phenomenon. Have you ever remembered an event, fact, or detail that turned out to be different from reality? What was it and how did you react when you found out your memory didn’t align with the facts? Does it happen often?
Somehow I had always thought it was Klu Klux Klan instead of Ku Klux Klan. I’m not sure where I got that or if anyone else thought the same thing though.
similarly: some people say “visa versa”
That’s an expecially bad one! (I knew a lawyer who said that lol)
I thought that until just now.
Glad to know I wasn’t alone!
I just found out that you can’t take someone’s lead in order to behave like they are behaving, you can only follow their lead.
I thought that taking someone’s lead, “I’m taking their lead”, is an actual expression, while apparently it is not.
It may not be the original idiom, but it’s definitely something people say. If the core expressions are “(I) take the lead” and “(you) follow my lead,” that lends itself easily to a merge: you take my lead. It’s not as common as the originals but it’s definitely out there. It will stick around because it’s really easy to unambiguously infer what it means in context.
I agree that it’s used, I’m sure that if we looked in movie scripts or novels, we would find examples of that phrase, but I can’t find a single dictionary that agrees that the phrase is a legitimate phrase, and that’s what really boggled my mind.
Boggled and boondoggled over here.
Just looked up “take my lead” on playphrase.me to check, it shows up in a couple movies, even a Star Wars.
“Take his lead” is on there too in a couple movies, nice.
Thanks, that’s a cool site I’ve never heard of.
The Berenstein Bears one and the Fruit of the Loom not having a horn are the ones that have me questioning reality and my childhood.
There is a theory that the Fruit of the Loom one is actually a viral marketing thing. Like the company scrubbed it on purpose and is playing into it to build brand recognition.
I vaguely remember noticing the fruit of the loom logo change which makes it weirder for me
Same here. It had the cornucopia. Then it didn’t. “weird” I thought. Then 5 to 10 years later I was reading the hunger games and needed to look up what a cornucopia actually was. “a horn usually containing fruit - oh - like the fruit of the loom logo” Then 2 years ago learning it never existed at all, and we all hallucinated it, there have even been paradies of it. It’s fucking weird.
I’m never sure if Castro is dead or not. I was sure for very long time that he died already but it would turn out that he’s still there. I also don’t remember any events specifically related to his death. His brother (?) took over and he kind of fizzled out before he died. Or maybe he’s still there? I’m never quite sure. I mean, it’s 2024 now, he’s definitely dead. Or is he?
He is since 2016, at least that’s what they want us to think.
There were probably a few things that contributed to the confusion. Hugo Chavez was very friendly with Castro and he died of cancer, before Fidel. Fidel was also super old, and his brother Raul took a more prominent role a few years before his death, so there was less visibility.
That gen 1 of Pokemon didn’t have compound types (i.e. Pokemon with two types). In reality they did
Ghost types are only weak to psychic in that game because they are poison types too. Ruined me for generations swearing psychic was super to ghost.
But…gen 1 doesn’t have dual type…right?
Venusaur is Grass/Poison.
Charizard is Fire/Flying.
Of course it does. I remember a lot of people thinking Rock types were immune to electric attacks because nearly every rock type in red and blue was also a ground type.
I’ve never heard that before and find it baffling.
Bulbasaur comes out of the gate with two types.
Charmander becomes Charizard with two types.
The first (or second) non-starter you encounter is Pidgy with two types.
The required Viridian Forest had Weedle with two types and if you only got a Caterpie, that becomes Butterfree who also has two types.
The number of two type Pokemon that you can catch at the start of the game is massive. Probably about half?
I get the “feeling” of a mandela effect far more frequently than i can solidly know for sure. I guess my first experience was decades ago as a child. I recall staring at a Bernstein bears book, and being oddly transfixed by tye fact that the spelling of the title did not match that of the authors name, literally inches apart on the same page. Later i experienced a schrodenbug or two (which i think is the same phenomenon), and one really solid social ME were a church ceased to exist (or got merged into a neighboring church). After the first few, now I fully admit I am WAY too quick to believe odd circumstance is a ME, and usually find myself reluctantly disproving that to myself with notebook/journal entries… only to later wonder how they might change too.
I could’ve sworn sprite didn’t have lime in it in Australia, yet I can find no evidence of it ever being made without lime
I could’ve sworn Jim Beam whiskey was Jim Bean. A friend of mine had a poster of a whiskey bottle on his wall that I stared at every time I was there. He was a minor at the time and didn’t drink, so I always wondered why he had it up. Years later I saw a Jim Beam bottle and had a Mandela moment. The Berenstein Bears and Mandela dying in jail were things I believed, too, but I think the whiskey one is one I haven’t heard from anybody else, yet.
I had to go look it up to double check you weren’t trying to pull a fast one; I was 100% sure it was Bean.
I’m sure it was called the mandala effect
You mean the Mengele effect?
A witch turned me into a newt.
When i got into monster hunter 4 ultimate(the one with a good story) i was told that Deviljho, a voracious monster that will eat anything mid combat to recover its stamina, will eat its own tail if you cut it. Everyone believed it, no one tried to capture it on camera because of the hardware limitation(no “clip that”, no shadowplay).
Turn out, millions of Monster Hunter fans remembered wrong because it’s a hoax.
None but I live in New Zealand and have met a lot of strange people online who think our geographic location has changed.
Like you’re not in the bottom right? Absurd!
I had some Berenstain Bears books as a kid and I remember noting at the time “huh, weird name but okay”. So like, I don’t get why people think it was “Berenstein”? It looks wrong, but it’s always looked wrong.
We knew the title and didn’t look that closely.
Here’s one I just experienced, was watching Star Wars: A New Hope and my brother asked me if I remember C-3PO every having a silver leg. I told him no, hes always been all gold. Next scene we watched his right leg from the knee down was all silver. Like wtf never have I noticed that before, I said meh maybe it was a Lucas later edit. Revenge of the Sith comes on the TV next and C-3PO’s leg is so vibrantly silver that I could not even comprehend not noticing that contrast in past viewings.
I only ever really noticed it in the desert scene after the escape pod, when he’s arguing with R2. It looks silver there, the rest of the time it looks gold. I think I probably assumed it was some video quality thing, either on my TV or that a lot of movies from that time period have weird quirky video. Like Logan’s Run was the year before Star Wars and if something gold sometimes looked silver, I wouldn’t really even notice, that’s just how a movie from the 70s looks.
it’s because we were watching it on 21" televisions from VHS
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