Why doesn't everybody know this stuff?

Yesterday at work, a woman came up to the register and asked, "What's a sonnet?"

To be honest, it took me a moment to realize that I hadn't misunderstood her question, so long has it been since I've talked about sonnets in the presence of someone who didn't know what one was. She had to repeat herself and explain that she had seen the words "Modern Sonnets" on a book somewhere.

In my best teacherly voice, I explained that a sonnet is a fourteen-line poem, and that the lines are written in something called "iambic pentameter," meaning that the meter sounds something like, "da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM." I told her that, traditionally, sonnets stick to a specific rhyme scheme, but contemporary sonnets don't necessarily have to.

Later, when I relayed this story to my co-worker, somehow expecting him to share my amazement that someone didn't know what a sonnet was, he simply replied, "All I know is that it's a kind of poem and Shakespeare wrote a lot of them."

I have the sudden impression that not everybody knows the same stuff as me and sees the word the way it is inside my head. It's very unsettling.