quote:No single example of the Mandela Effect has generated more online buzz than that of the children's book series and animated TV show The Berenstain Bears. Quite a few people who grew up with the series, it turns out, remember the title being The Berenstein Bears, with the name ending in "ein" instead of "ain" (with some even going to go so far as to maintain that the fictional bears' surname was changed along the way to make it "less Jewish"):
Memory is a funny, fickle thing. But I guess that's the beauty of it.
Posts: 2926 | Registered: Sep 2005
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quote:Originally posted by Bokonon: I see what you did there...
The crazy thing is... I thought it was Berenstein as well. And I know I've heard that quote. Even though I know it doesn't exist.
Posts: 2926 | Registered: Sep 2005
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posted
I never thought about it much, and didn't realize this was a thing until someone had brought it up.
It makes a lot of sense though.
By the time I was six or so, I'd moved on to the Baby-Sitters Little Sister books, and the Berenstain Bear books are from an era when I could read but not well, though I read a lot (okay this isn't true, I did read their chapter books).
Berenstain is a very large word for a young kid, and try as we might, phonics helps kids sound out words, but it's not what you use to read English. You read words because you recognize them. We've all seen that thing whree the lsat and frist lteetr of ecah wrod are the smae and you can sitll raed it. You know that word is Berenstxxn and you know what that word is supposed to be, how to say it, and at that age you don't really write more than four sentences at a time for the teacher, so no body actually makes time for the word. It's only on the cover of the books, the family's last name is Bear.
Meanwhile, fast forward 15 years. You know how to spell and write, and you haven't thought of those bears in years. You've also learned something about culture, and Germanish names or Jewish ones, which can end in stein. And a lot of people in English pronounce it "steen", even though that's just plan wrong (last name of an ex high school friend, as it happens). And to be honest, I don't know anybody whose last name ends in stain. Jessica Chastain, but that's not the same.
So now, as an adult, if you try to spell Berenstain, you've never spelled the word before, you don't know any stains, but plenty of steins, it's kinda sounds like steen, yes your adult brain, which is full of heuristcs is going to think it was stein.
Posts: 1757 | Registered: Oct 2004
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posted
oh i was getting super tired of all that progress and achievement and the general stability of unipolarity that made it safer and better to live now than ever before in history
i figured i might as well go to a universe where just barely enough of a minority of americans in just the right places look at a clinically narcissistic yam with known tendencies towards apoplectic irrationality and an incapacity to focus on complex subject matter for more than a few minutes at a time and say 'you know what i want this unqualified man and his various hatreds to be in control of the country because he told us he would build a wall to keep brown people out'
really keeps things lively
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