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The Mandela Effect: False Memory

GerdaWordyer said:
Could it be that ---stein is a more common suffix than --stain, and people just use mental shorthand, or laziness? Sort of like the typos you see for Ziegfield and Seinfield instead of Ziegfeld and Seinfeld.
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I'm with you - I always thought this was the solution

BTW - Reddit GitM has 2 full topics about it - if you have 2 days to spend... this is it

1- https://www.reddit.com/r/Glitch_in_...ndela_effect_reports_go_here_berenstainstein/
2- https://www.reddit.com/r/Glitch_in_the_Matrix/comments/3e1ot9/mandela_effect_reports_go_here_ii/
 
Bumping the old thread.

I had my first Mandela effect yesterday. I have finally decided to watch "True Detective" season 1.... or in my case "True Detectives" as I clearly remember reading about in numerous magazines/sites. I know we have mentioned the show in a number of topics here as well .... of course, now it is "True Detective" everywhere.

My Fortean mind is telling me that I was linking the title with the fact that there are 2 main characters, thus "... Detectives".

Am I alone in this one?

btw - amazing show!!!
 
dejanmikic said:
Am I alone in this one?

btw - amazing show!!!
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I always thought Detective as in True Crime, True Romance. Like describing a genre.
It is amazing, I loved it but unfortunately I thought it fell apart at the end. Didn't stop me watching season 2 though.
 
I can't believe this Berenstein or Berenstain Bears thing. I'm trying to see if my 10 year old still has some of these books laying around just to see how it's spelled. Sounds like a lot of nice hoax blaming it on parallel universes.
 
Sounds like something I've noticed: in the main people are hazy as to whether the eminent hobbitophile J.R.R. has a surname spelt "Tolkein" or "Tolkien". It all seems to hinge on whether you pronounce it with two syllables or three. I'm hazy on it myself and tend to use both interchangeably - every so often I go to look it up but it never sticks.

As for the Berenstein/stain bears, my horrible mind has me thinking of a very Jewish Mama Bear saying to the cubs "I don't care the zooologists say we're omnivores. Gevalt, you eat omnivore, see if I care, but you promise your mother you eat kosher omnivore. If the picnic basket has traife in it, Yogi, you do not touch."

Interestingly enough, this page image has the "Berenstain" spelling as well as an unintentionally funny cover that subtly conveys the wrong message:

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FantasticRacism
 
GerdaWordyer said:
Could it be that ---stein is a more common suffix than --stain, and people just use mental shorthand, or laziness? Sort of like the typos you see for Ziegfield and Seinfield instead of Ziegfeld and Seinfeld.
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Yes, laziness - but also familiarity. If a certain chap had not graduated from being an odd bloke who played records and was once on TV, into being the UK's most infamous celebrity pervert, I wonder how many people would be able to spell his surname correctly five years after his death. (I'd bet a bag of toffees that most people would double up on the L, and that they'd need some convincing that they were wrong.)
 
Krepostnoi said:
I have never heard of the Berenstain bears, in either spelling. Mind you, the first twenty-eight years of my life were apparently spent in a universe without Dr Seuss, although mine is a family which values wordplay, so you might well have expected him to be a presence. Then I embarked on an MA course where everyone else had grown up reading him. :huh: This was genuinely a jarring discovery for me.
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Same for me. Never heard of him until about 1993 - didn't have a clue what a Grinch was - and then suddenly Dr. Seuss was everywhere and apparently everyone else had had their childhood moulded by him.
 
I think these `Mandela Effect` faddists have stumbled onto something interesting - but it's not about multiple universes, it's about how our cognitive processes work.

We have pre-set expectations of how the world is patterned and will project these onto things even when incoming data tells us otherwise.

We already know a few names ending in `stein` - Frankenstein for example. So when we see Berenstain our minds miss the last bit - even when its staring us in the face and `correct` it to `stein`. I believe some call this process Confirmation Bias, or something.

Likewise a lot of remember `Sex in the City` (it's Sex and the City) and `Interview with a Vampire` (it's `Interview with the Vampire).

I'm a teacher of the English Langauge and am very aware of how this factor can work against people learning new things. Thus, for example, many Russians will pronounce the word `biscuit` like `biskwit` - because that's how it's spelled. Once this has become an ingrained habit it's very hard to dispel, even up to advanced level.

As for myself -I always have to remind myself that `advertisement`has an `e` after the `s` - because I pronounce the word in the British English way (with a short /i/ sound) rather than in the American English way.
 
Loquaciousness said:
Precisely WHO remembers Nelson Mandela dying in his cell in the 1980's. No-one I know does?
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I had a vague recollection that he had died in the 80's. I had to check his wikipedia just now to make sure he really was dead. I don't know anyone, and I have asked quite a few people now, who remember them as Barenstain though. I also remember Jiffy peanut butter although it never existed, only Jif peanut butter.
https://www.reddit.com/r/MandelaEffect/comments/2xbnet/jif_vs_jiffy_peanut_butter/
 
I remember when I was a kid, having an argument with another kid at school about the names of the authors of Asterix.
He thought they were called Goscinny and Underzo. I corrected him, saying they were called Goscinny and Uderzo.
Anyhoo, I asked lots of other kids and they all agreed with him.
The next day, I took an Asterix book into school to prove my point.

Yeah, yeah, I'm a pedant.

It's funny how they all thought this, though.
 
Some Mandelas are silly, all the spelling ones are lame. But there are a few I can't understand. Rich Uncle Pennybags the Monopoly mascot doesn't have a monocle. So why do I remember him having one? But even weirder is why does Jim Carey ask a guy with a monocle if he is the Monopoly Man?
And why can I find 100s of references to a monocled monopoly guy is the old newspapers in Google news? The defining characteristic of this character is his monocle, but he never had one and never did.
 
paranoid420 said:
Some Mandelas are silly, all the spelling ones are lame. But there are a few I can't understand. Rich Uncle Pennybags the Monopoly mascot doesn't have a monocle. So why do I remember him having one? But even weirder is why does Jim Carey ask a guy with a monocle if he is the Monopoly Man?
And why can I find 100s of references to a monocled monopoly guy is the old newspapers in Google news? The defining characteristic of this character is his monocle, but he never had one and never did.
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Many people think he has one. Must be one of the bigger misconceptions out there. I've only found unofficial images of Rich Uncle Pennybags where he got a monocle.
 
Yeah, it's a strange one - but not unaccountable for. I understand that Monopoly was originally intended as a satire on capitalism - and by the 1890's the classic image of the capitalist was that of a man with a monocle. There is even a quasi-idiomatic phrase: `the man with the monocle` to allude to a tycoon.

In the 1920s the Russian novelist Mikhail Bulgakov came under fire from Soviet critics for havins a publicity photo of himself appear in which he was wearing a monocle. He claimed that he did so for legitimate medical reasons, but nevertheless this image did much to seal his fate as a disident writer which was to overhadow the rest of his career.

Might you be thinking of the old Sunny Jim image from the Force cereal packet and other promotional items? Viz:
SUNNY JIM.jpg
This was still common enough in 70's Britain.


Having dispensed with, to my own satisfaction, the Molly braces issue - the two remaining baffling Mandela effects to me are:
(a) C3P0's silver leg. I'm not much of a Star Wars fan but I've asked around and nobody seems to be aware that the golden robot had, and apparenly always had, a silver shin!
Some people put this down to the lighting in the desert scenes, but there are some indoor shots where the silver shin is clearly visible!
(b) The `dilemma` versus `dilemna` thing. Nonsensical as it is I do have a faint but very dogged feeling that we were told that the word had a silent `n' in it somehwere - and that this made the word awkward. It's hard to put this down to an internalised comon mispelling (like `definately`) because `dilemna` is completely atypical of any word group, and unphonetic!
 
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People say Mr peanut and the New Yorker magazine guy too as answers to where the monocle came from. Every monopoly guy costume has a monocle, it's the defining characteristic, they are the monopoly guy because they have a monocle.

I have dismissed most spelling ones , and most movie lines too. But the A team van being two tone with a stripe and not all back with a stripe blew me away. And the Smithsonian being Institution not Institute, every person I asked about that one said Institute (I am in Canada)
 
I would have said Smithsonian Institute too, but I'm a Brit and only dimly aware of what that institution actually is anyway.

Yeah, some of the spelling ones are becoming a real bore. I mean the Berenstein Vs Berenstein furore, which has become the `Poster boy` of the whole supposed phenomena can be explained away quite easily.

I'm sure that I read somewhere (ok, so citation needed) that the Berenstain family were originally Ukrainian immigrants. That means that their surname would have been written in the cyrillic alphabet (which is very similar to Russian). That also means that their names would have had to have been transliterated into English - and transliterations are always only an approximation of the word in its own alphabet. So there may well be two versions of the name knocking about out there.

Another example is the Russian name Gorbachev. I have seen this spelt both as Gorbachev and Gorbachov.This is because in the Russian original the `o/ e` vowel in the name is taken by a letter called `the yod` which looks like an `e` with two dots over it. This has a `yoi` sound to it. There is no English languge equivalent in our alphabet so we choose beteen `e` and `o` - the former being more common.

I am also sure that I came across on Reddit someone had downloaded of one of the Berenstain books - or maybe a video -(yeah, citation needed again) where the name was spelt both ways on the same product. That gives the whole thing away surely: it's about spelling confusion and not paralell universes.

In quantum physics paralell universes are an `either/or` choice: they cannot co-exist in the same space. So when you open Schrodinger's box, that cat is either dead or alive - but can't be both at the same time.
 
Zeke Newbold said:
by the 1890's the classic image of the capitalist was that of a man with a monocle
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As I was reading this, an image came to mind with the title of a song: "Gilbert the Filbert, the Colonel of the Knuts."

I have the feeling that it is sung by Arthur Lowe in the film of The Ruling Class, which I saw earlier this year. He learns that he has received a bequest from his aristocratic employer, gets drunk, insults them and breaks into song.

I created my own Mandela Effect by imagining the song was an early advertising jingle - for nuts! I could even see the mascot: a nut with a monacle. In fact, the song is spelled as above, "knut" and was written in 1914 as a parody of the posh man-about-town. Two years afterwards, Mr Peanut became the monacled mascot for Planter's. I was confusing the two. A filbert, in any case, is a hazlenut.

Here is Sir Kreemy Knut, the languid, smoking, monacle man of Sharp's toffee.
ADC-Sir-Kreemy-Knut-AC3.jpg


There were a lot of them about!

I certainly remember Sunny Jim from the Force packet. In the bright and flashy world of breakfast cereals, the retro. design and subdued colouring made the product stand out. I am sorry to say manufacture ceased in 2013. :(
 
Zeke Newbold said:
C3P0's silver leg. I'm not much of a Star Wars fan but I've asked around and nobody seems to be aware that the golden robot had, and apparenly always had, a silver shin!
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None of the toys or models I saw ever had a silver shin so maybe people are more likely to remember him as all gold because seeing the action figures would have been more common than seeing the actual film, back in the days before home video really took off.
 
Reading back through the thread - the most obvious answer (to me) hasn't been mentioned yet...I think.

In the image of the books at the start of the thread, the name is written in a 'handwriting' style font. Lower case 'e' and 'a' in this style look pretty similar, and as -stein is a more common suffix in names than -stain, I reckon the wonderful human brain has read the letter it expects to see.

The names of the authors at the bottom are in a clearer font, but if people are reading from top-to-bottom then the damage has already been done.

My one doubt in this scenario is that the young kids who read these books won't have had the exposure to names that us aged souls have, so why would the child's brain convert the 'a' to an 'e'? Unless their parents read the stories to them, and the error was passed from generation to generation that way....
 
Zeke Newbold said:
I am also sure that I came across on Reddit someone had downloaded of one of the Berenstain books - or maybe a video -(yeah, citation needed again) where the name was spelt both ways on the same product. That gives the whole thing away surely: it's about spelling confusion and not paralell universes.
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Redditors will actually spend hours photoshopping those Berenstain books just to troll. As far as I know all the actual books/videos/records are all spelled correct.
But most Mandelas have perfectly good explanations
The one that really annoys me is "We are the Champions" at the end of the song Freddie Mercury says "of the world" but he doesn't say it on the studio version. He does however say it at Live Aid in front of a billion people on TV and then MTV turned that into the video so people saw that version over and over for years.
 
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davidplankton said:
None of the toys or models I saw ever had a silver shin so maybe people are more likely to remember him as all gold because seeing the action figures would have been more common than seeing the actual film, back in the days before home video really took off.
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Except that many of th toys do have a silver shin:
C3PO.jpg



AlsoI was speaking to 9 year old kid recently who told me that he was a big Star Wars fan. The silver shin thing seemed to be news to him too! (He was, however, observant enough to notice that C3PO has - now - a red hand. This detail is only a new detail and is incorporated into the polt somehow.)

Kids notice stuff. I remember that if one of the daleks was a different colour you'd be: `Daddy! Daddy! Why is that dalek gold? ` (When you're that age you are still naive enough to think that everything must have a reason!)

And yet - like Everyone Else - I aw the first Star Wars movie when it came out on the big screen and, despite being a kid, somehow didn't pick up on the remarakable fact that C3PO has an unexplained silver shin! Odd, don't you think?
 
Well, he's got a red arm now, and you need to buy the tie-in comic book to find out why!
 
Zeke Newbold said:
I remember that if one of the daleks was a different colour
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I think they had to make The Supreme Dalek black in the days of monochrome telly. It's a distinction still honoured in supermarket packaging today: stick a bit of black and gold on it and treble the price!

I was more into daleks than nuns. I can clearly remember being upbraided for referring to a visit by Mother Superior as the day we met the Supreme Nun! She did have some bits of distinctive streamlining on her habit and accessories!

"Immaculate! Immaculate!"

"Arghhhhhhhhhh!"

You don't mess with The Supreme Nun! :eek:
 
kamalktk said:
The Mandela effect is the general name for things like this. A relatively large group of people remember Nelson Mandela dying in his cell in the 1980's. The spelling of the bears is one other thing where a large group of people remember something else. The fortean core of the idea is that the discrepancy is evidence of parallel universes/multiple timestreams/glitches in the matrix.

I too remember Berenstein. Perhaps this is because my young mind interpreted there to be three of the letter e in the name for consistency. Or like you I am from the same alternate universe!
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We lived in Ohio from 1991 to 1994 . My sons loved the books and it was definitely Bernstein- unfamiliar name to us Brits so very memorable. A few years later back in Britain we came across these much loved characters as beer stain. I thought it was one of those inexplicable publishing changes, did not realise I had changed realities as well as continent.
Annic
 
nicnac168 said:
We lived in Ohio from 1991 to 1994 . My sons loved the books and it was definitely Bernstein- unfamiliar name to us Brits so very memorable. A few years later back in Britain we came across these much loved characters as beer stain. I thought it was one of those inexplicable publishing changes, did not realise I had changed realities as well as continent.
Annic
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The bears got it's name from the authors, Stan and Jan Berenstain, so it's not something they could easily change.
 
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