The Mandela Effect: False Memory

hunck said:
I only found out recently that well known suffragette was named Emmeline Pankhurst & not Emily.
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This rings a bell. I'm wondering if she was also known as Emily for short as I can certainly remember reading about her under that name.
 
Peripart said:
No, that was an actual Emily.
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Ah yes of course, Emily Davison....I'm getting my Emmeline and my Emily mixed up.
It's easily done.
But then we don't know for sure if the Pankster wasn't also fond of equine annoyance. Maybe she did it in her spare time.
 
Trevp666 said:
Ah yes of course, Emily Davison....I'm getting my Emmeline and my Emily mixed up.
It's easily done.
But then we don't know for sure if the Pankster wasn't also fond of equine annoyance. Maybe she did it in her spare time.
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Indeed, while she never shoed a horse, she did once tell a donkey to duck off.
 
I was sure this guy had died of cancer maybe a year ago and I even remember seeing his obituary. But he's still here.... maybe it was another extravagantly bearded Scouser, or something?

Ricky Tomlinson, actor
 
AgProv said:
I was sure this guy had died of cancer maybe a year ago and I even remember seeing his obituary. But he's still here.... maybe it was another extravagantly bearded Scouser, or something?

Ricky Tomlinson, actor
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I’m very surprised to see this as I also have a memory of reading about Ricky Tomlinson’s death not too long ago. Definitely one for the “people you thought were dead” thread.
 
blessmycottonsocks said:
BBC article today citing the Mandela effect as being behind people misremembering famous quotations from TV and movies.
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But surely the Mandela Effect posits that we slip universes or timelines or something and that's why we believe something to have happened that didn't (or the other way round). People 'misremembering' is something else (and probably the real reason). How can the Mandela Effect be 'behind people misremembering'? Either the Mandela Effect is in...er...effect, or people are misremembering - one or the other.
 
Carse said:
I’m very surprised to see this as I also have a memory of reading about Ricky Tomlinson’s death not too long ago. Definitely one for the “people you thought were dead” thread.
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Ricky is lovely. My Scouser workmates adore him.
I've met him just once. His demeanour was delightful and he made me laugh so much I seriously thought 'I could run away with him!'
Didn't know who he was until afterwards.
 
I have only ever heard Emily Pankhurst not Emmiline - when I checked Wikipedia, it has the following tucked away "Emmeline Goulden was born on Sloan Street in the Moss Side district of Manchester on 15 July 1858. At school her teachers called her Emily, a name she preferred to be called."
Biography Online refers to her as Emily about half way into this entry - https://www.biographyonline.net/emily-pankhurst.html
"In 1912, Emily Pankhurst was convicted of breaking windows and sent to Holloway Prison. In prison, she went on hunger strike in protest about the appalling conditions that prisoners were kept in."
Also it now seems she went and joined the Conservative party in 1926 - not in the Universe I started out in she didn't.
Are we mid "change" ?
 
hunck said:
I only found out recently that well known suffragette was named Emmeline Pankhurst & not Emily.
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Are you possibly getting her mixed up with Emily Davidson? She was another suffragette almost as famous due to being killed after George V's horse collided with her at the 1913 Epsom Derby.
 
Beresford said:
Are you possibly getting her mixed up with Emily Davidson? She was another suffragette almost as famous due to being killed after George V's horse collided with her at the 1913 Epsom Derby.
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Could be a contributing factor, but seems Emmeline preferred to be called Emily so that adds to the mixup.
 
Shortening of names can lead to much confusion. My youngest daughter's name is Riyadh. At home she's known as Addie, although when she was younger (and still sometimes) I call her Libby (long story, favourite book when she was small).

As a result, one of my workmates thought I had three separate daughters: one called Riyadh, one called Addie and one called Libby. As I do have three daughters, but the other two are Vienna and Fern, this caused much confusion when they met my children.

I also know an Evangeline who is always always known as Evie.

So Emmeline being shortened to, and known as, Emily, would be perfectly common, just confusing when both forms of her name are used. We should agree on one and stick to it!
 
I have a friend called Ross, who I’ve known since childhood. It wasn’t until the exchange of vows at his wedding ceremony that I found out his given name is actually Kevin which caused me to do a proper cartoon double take. Ross doesn’t appear in his ‘proper’ name at all, either first or middle.

At the risk of a slapped wrist for mentioning a political figure, it has been reported that Boris Johnson is univerally known to his family and friends as Al - the shortened form of his first name, Alexander. “Boris” is just a sort of trading name for his bumbling comedic political character which he adopted at Eton College in the late 1970s.
 
A new twist on the Mandela effect: Chat GPT will "find" (fabricate) an article that never existed:

Chris Moran, the head of editorial innovation at The Guardian, offered one such example. Last week, his team was contacted by a researcher asking why the paper had deleted a specific article from its archive. Moran and his team checked and discovered that the article in question hadn’t been deleted, because it had never been written or published: ChatGPT had hallucinated the article entirely. (Moran declined to share any details about the article. My colleague Ian Bogost encountered something similar recently when he asked ChatGPT to find an Atlantic story about tacos: It fabricated the headline “The Enduring Appeal of Tacos,” supposedly by Amanda Mull.)

The situation was quickly resolved but left Moran unsettled. “Imagine this in an area prone to conspiracy theories,” he later tweeted. “These hallucinations are common. We may see a lot of conspiracies fuelled by ‘deleted’ articles that were never written.”
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https://www.theatlantic.com/technol...enerated-fake-trump-indictment-images/673513/
 
I have been pondering for some time of I'm a victim of the Mandela Effect as I've been combing Google Maps searching for a section of the North Wales coast with a very distinctive outcrop of rock that I visited more than 30 years ago, to no avail.

At the weekend though, I read that the area suffers from severe coastal erosion and sections of boulders had been moved/added over the years to combat this, so it looks like I'm wrong on that one.
 
catseye said:
Shortening of names can lead to much confusion. My youngest daughter's name is Riyadh. At home she's known as Addie, although when she was younger (and still sometimes) I call her Libby (long story, favourite book when she was small).

As a result, one of my workmates thought I had three separate daughters: one called Riyadh, one called Addie and one called Libby. As I do have three daughters, but the other two are Vienna and Fern, this caused much confusion when they met my children.

I also know an Evangeline who is always always known as Evie.

So Emmeline being shortened to, and known as, Emily, would be perfectly common, just confusing when both forms of her name are used. We should agree on one and stick to it!
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Lawks, was one conceived in Saudi Arabia, another in Austria, and the third in a bush?
 
ShadyCavalier said:
Lawks, was one conceived in Saudi Arabia, another in Austria, and the third in a bush?
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Ha. No, not to my knowledge! Vienna is named after the Ultravox song, and Riyadh after an Al Stewart song. Fern was going to be Willow, but we were still hoping for a boy to be called William and Willow and William sounded like the twee-est twin names ever, so she was Fern.
 
Carse said:
I have a friend called Ross, who I’ve known since childhood. It wasn’t until the exchange of vows at his wedding ceremony that I found out his given name is actually Kevin which caused me to do a proper cartoon double take. Ross doesn’t appear in his ‘proper’ name at all, either first or middle.

At the risk of a slapped wrist for mentioning a political figure, it has been reported that Boris Johnson is univerally known to his family and friends as Al - the shortened form of his first name, Alexander. “Boris” is just a sort of trading name for his bumbling comedic political character which he adopted at Eton College in the late 1970s.
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My dad goes by his middle name which is fun. We have to remember to use his actual first name for official things.

My Grandma’s sister was aunty Jean. Only at her funeral did I find out she was really Jane. Did someone get dyslexic at some point? All the right letters but not necessarily in the right order.
 
MorningAngel said:
My Grandma’s sister was aunty Jean. Only at her funeral did I find out she was really Jane. Did someone get dyslexic at some point? All the right letters but not necessarily in the right order.
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That was quite common back in the day. I've done a bit of research into my family tree and have come across exactly the same on more than one occasion.
 
I had an auntie who was known in the family as 'Bubbles'. As a child you really don't question why the wizened and eccentric older generation seem to have bizarre names, because, when you are seven, the names 'Doris' and 'Brenda' are pretty odd and eccentric. So it was never questioned and nobody ever asked how the hell one came to be christened 'Bubbles'.

I was a teenager before I found out her real name was Esme. Which I'd never heard of before, so we all carried on calling her Bubbles. Now every second girl is called Esme. Personally I can't wait for Doris and Brenda to make a reappearance.
 
My youngest has a longish Welsh name. When she was a baby we watched Naked Video on TV, featuring Sîadwel the Welsh Poet, played by John Sparkes. We did of course jokingly start calling the baby Sîadwel to each other and she thought it was her 'other' name.

When she was about four she said 'Mum, I have two names, don't I?' and on learning to write, spelled it out phonetically as 'Shadwell' which I found very clever indeed.

We still call her Sîadwel, or more often Sîad, pronounced Shad. She doesn't mind. :chuckle:
 
MorningAngel said:
My dad goes by his middle name which is fun. We have to remember to use his actual first name for official things.
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My maternal grandmother was never known by her first name, always by her middle name, or a shortened version of it.

A small amount of research into my family tree suggests that this wasn't uncommon. Many of the relatives of my grandparents' generation went by something other than their real first name.
 
Many Muslim families call a son Mohammed but give them another name to avoid confusion.
 
Also, name shortenings. Margaret to Peggy? Who came up with that one?

My mother was christened Betty. Not Elizabeth, just plain Betty. But many people assumed it was a contraction. Her sister was Peggy. Not Margaret, just Peggy. Researching our family tree would be a treat...
 
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