Berenstain Blame: Titor?

originally posted by: jaws1975
a reply to: HawkeyeNation

I see it in my minds eye as Berenstein, what makes it interesting is how many other people say the same thing. Even if you think this is all poppeycock, you have to admit that it's pretty strange that so many people swear it was Berenstein. If it is so common for people to mix up letters like this, is there any other examples out there that have been as well known as this particular name? And why not?

When that first thread went up I was probably in a little bit of shock. My explanation above is me making excuse for something like this as it just seems so f'n strange lol. But you are also right....there isn't anything else I can think of as a kid being spelled differently.

i do recall a discussion with '-stein' classmates whose suffix was pronounced like einstein as to why berenstein wasn't pronounced like that, but there was a bernstein whose surname was pronounced like berenstein so that shed some light.

i recall silversteen being not silverstein (bruce). stain? we would have questioned the crap out of if it it was spelled like that back then.

dont think nowadays kids would care; too busy playing World of Warcraft and roblox! (sp)

Did he affect the name? Depends on if he can be shown as a real person with a real claim, besides that it seems doubtful that the whole Berenstain speculation would be impacted by him anyway due to his timeline( such as 2036 and 1875 not 1979 into the 80s), etc.

Was Titor ever a member here? No.

These books are the kind of books that get read to you when you're a kid. Phonetically it sounds like STEEN so it's perfectly natural that thousands of people's memories would have recorded STEEN as the correct spelling and then adjusted subconsciously to STEIN as they learned actual phonetics, because that's just how the brain works. Plus the name is usually written in script, which children would not be likely to read carefully to see the exact spelling. So itwould actually be surprising if no one remembered it wrong.

I'm not sure why everyone doesn't realize that it's perfectly possible, even expected, to have mistakes in long-term memory, especially when you have a name that doesn't follow English phonetics. English-speakers are trained from early childhood education to expect something pronounced STEEN to be spelled with an 'E', our brains are hard-wired to process sounds that way, so it's very easy to miss that a foreign name is breaking that rule, especially when it's one to which you wouldn't have paid careful attention to the spelling. It has always been STAIN and it has always been pronounced STEEN by many, many people.

it would be interesting to see when the very first discussions started popping up cuz obviously the younger generation have 'always' known it to be Berenstain whereas

likewise i'm hoping for what its worth, that it would just go back to Berenstein, somehow, eventually! it is just so scandalous to see those books i remember seeing as stein for years and years and even discussing the pronounciation with classmates, now changed to an inexplicable and unlikely spelling altogether and plastered around as if like no one will notice although this new generation couldnt care less. i do know that back in my schooldays, if it was stain, the conversations would be about how come it isn't stein and guess they're not 'jewish' bears.

interestingly enuf, they have taken such stark turn from nondenominational bears to bona-fide 'christian' bears so in a way, berenstain now seems way more suitable for these 'born again' christian bears than their former stein/jewish roots!

berenstainbears.wordpress.com...

Our backgrounds were different – Jewish and Protestant. But we thought of ourselves as, simply, American and, primarily, as artists.

Comparing notes further, there was something more significant we had in common – our American childhoods.

a reply to: Sovan

But, what if he ends up dating and marrying his mother? Enter major paradox!

or even more trippier

What if he is.....deleted so as not to spoil the mind F*** for those that haven't watched and are into time travel and timeline changes

www.imdb.com...


Man, that movie was brilliant.

the thing that interests me most about this phenom is how insistent everyone is. I distinctly remember it as stEin, sure, and i would totally write that off to memory lapse except that so many other people have memories just as distinct. That doesn't make me exactly believe it, but it does give me pause. It's not common for such a large group to be so vehement about a single 'mistake'.

Anyway, on the actual subject of the thread;
Could some guy travelling back to 1975 using methods both shady and poorly explained alter time? I don't know. It does seem pretty far fetched, but I've argued temporal mechanics with close acquaintances for decades and we can't come up with a way of knowing for definitively sure, short of being involved or some large scale public test.
What we can say with a high degree of certainty is that no one travelling to 1975 for whatever reason could cause a letter to change in a name already established at that point. Not unless our current understanding of time is so ridiculously flawed that learning the truth would require a rethink of literally everything we know. somehow... that doesn't seem likely.

I Still call it the same way as if it would be spelled STAIN. Even though its spelled diffrently. thats what we call a SIMILIE RIGHT?

a reply to: yuppa

You mean "Stein"?

That's a "mispronunciation" not a "simile".

A simile is when you compare two things that have nothing to do with one another to add dramatic effect.

"Cute as a button"

You know, I now wish I wouldn't have given my Berenstein books away from when I was a kid.(Did this about two to three months ago because my son didn't read them anymore.) I could have sworn it was Berenstein, and that is how I spell it and grew up. I loved them... even watched the tv show. Maybe the publisher changed the name?

originally posted by: OrphanApology
a reply to: yuppa

You mean "Stein"?

That's a "mispronunciation" not a "simile".

A simile is when you compare two things that have nothing to do with one another to add dramatic effect.

"Cute as a button"

OOPS my bad. Well its only a mispronunciation according to how you learn to speak. if you are german its souds diffrent if english it sounds liek i originally said.

a reply to: yuppa

Well if you're speaking in English then you would pronounce it as you would if you were speaking in English.

So someone from say Mexico that says "Hey-seuss" instead of "Jesus" is mispronouncing the diety's name when speaking in English even if the same pronunciation is correct when speaking in Spanish.

For those of us who are so insistent on it once being Berenstein...If we can admit memory mistakes on all other areas including spelling of other words and names, why won't we admit to it being Berenstain? For us it just doesn't seem possible. It would be like finding out that Alice in wonderland was always Alex in wonderland, or Poo Bear being Coo Bear. You would be sitting here going WHAT?

I can see the confusion with the stein part being pronounced either like steen or the stein part with ei sounding like eye, but stain is completely different. There should be no confusion in that spelling and how it sounds.

And again, why don't we remember jokes about the stain part? Kids would certainly make fun of that.

Never mind divergent time-lines... Titor was a fraud as far as I could tell from cursory examination years ago...

but everyone in the know knows the Berenstein/stain divergence is due to the secret technology guys (you know, the black world scientists who found parts of our historical type 2 civilization that blew itself up several million years ago) experimenting with mass consciousness/mind control ... they superimposed "stain" to see how effective their methods where... the ones still thinking it was Berenstein (the real spelling) just weren't as susceptible to their methods of consciousness manipulation.

Or was it Bernstein? Darn, they got me, too!

Now, to be clear, I'm not serious about the above fable... I have no insider access and memory is fallible unless you are a freakish eidetic/photographic sort... but it's exactly as likely as some guy on the internet really coming from the future and giving bad predictions that folks ignore by saying the timelines were disrupted.

Fun stuff, none the less.

indeed its the few who SWEAR by it always having been STAIN that are likely in for a surprise sometime down the line, less it actually be a case of parallel realities crossing.

i'm more inclined to believe that since time-space is a bonafide dimensional continuum, it can (and may have) be(en) changed!

certain of:

- BerenstEin

- MIRROR, mirror

- THE neighborbood

as for Titor, likely a fraud; but anything's possible (just not likely).

I'm willing to give timeline shifts resulting from incursions from the future a pass, but this is not an instance of that. I don't think the changes in the past that affect the present are that obvious. I tend to think that they're felt more on a subconscious level, something down in the quantum interface of your neurons. Echoes of the way things used to be before they were altered in the past. These usually get chalked up to faulty memories, but I'm willing to speculate that they might be more than that.

P.S. -- And not Titor. A time traveler would have the option of returning to the past as many times as they wanted to make sure that they weren't discovered and didn't screw things up so badly that they stranded themselves.

It's pretty obvious to me that the name was misspelled by everyone back in the 70's 80's, including the media... and at some point must have been quietly corrected somewhere along the way.

I remember it as Berenstein, pronounced it as Beren-steen, and remember our elementary teachers spelling and pronouncing it that same way too.

If you look closely at this old tv guide from 1985 under Saturday morning @ 7am, you can clearly see that it was spelled "Berenstein".

I'm willing to bet that if we were to dig out old archives of tv guides, newspapers, advertisements, etc from the 70's and 80's we would discover that 99% of the time the name was spelled as Berenstein, not Berenstain.

Hence the reason why so many of us from the older generation distinctly remember it as Berenstein, because it was apparently misspelled that way by just about everyone.

I was one of the " stein " folks, swearing up and down It was such, at the same time having ADD I know my memories are the last to be 100% relied on.

So I did some searching to see if I can find anything that wasn't related to the " proof " that this issue is related too, so any photo shopping is not done.

I found this so far and the evidence points 100% at the " stain " being the correct spelling.

1986 TV guide - From - brandedinthe80s.com/category/tv-guide

1985 - 1986 TV guide from wiki

yes correct but not original as far as so many (majority?) of the public seeing it spelled Berenstein on everything and now those books we remember as physically bearing proof of that spelling seem to somehow changed to the new/correct spelling and all we has is our memories and certainty of them in most instances.

if it were Berenstain, some folks in their 20s and 30s would have memories of joking about or stressing the STAIN. ie, berry stain bears. i've only ever heard that term from my 6/7yo nephew and niece joking about their new books.

a good measure might be to ask kids 5-10 years from what they recollect about the new/correct spelling among classmates, and with teachers. if THEY joked about the 'STAIN' yet the previous generation (ours) didn't, then something is definitely off.

a reply to: Sovan

I have noted such changes throughout my life. In the world as I remember it the Kingdom of Bavaria existed until Hitler invaded Bavaria and Austria in the Anschluß. That ceased to be 'this reality' at a certain point in time. I felt a sort of wave pass over me and wondered greatly what it was. It seemed to be passing over me but not moving through me or touching me. When the wave passed, the only thing I noticed was that suddenly there was no Kingdom of Bavaria. The entire Bavarian royal family had not been murdered at Dachau. When I asked people I knew well about how they remembered this, they looked at me as though I were insane. I have never met anyone who recalls history in this way.

There were a few other changes I noticed through the years. In the timeline I was in Nelson Mandela was executed, he was never imprisoned. His execution started a bloodletting of such proportion I cannot even begin to express it. Then the timeline or something changed and there was a great funeral for Mandela, then the timeline changed again and the great Mandela was alive and being released from prison. The great bloodletting never happened. This was a case of a very positive change as if a divine power kept tinkering until a better timeline was chosen.

I do not know what these things mean. I ponder them and they yield no answers to me. Time war? Time travellers making changes? The divine field shifting around timelines in this Universe for some purpose? I would like to know because I am curious by nature. As for Titor, whether real or fake, what he said had a profound edge to it. He said he was not from our timeline or worldline, but from one near it. That easily explains why things happened in his world that did not transpire here. The 'Titor event' made people think, and perhaps the desire was simply to nudge our thinking in a particular direction much as people's way of thinking changes ever so slightly every time Michio Kaku appears on the scene.