Is Literacy Moribund in These [Dis]United States?

I see it all the time, but again today some “misunderedumacated” subliterate stuck on the lefthand side of the Dunning-Kruger Curve pontificated on a subject he was–of course–completely unqualified (because of his ignorance) to comment on, and while doing so misused “wreckless,” because (again, of course) he did not know the differences between “reckless” and “wreckless.” Such subliterate (or really, by any reasonable standard, illiterate) people almost always misuse all or some of the following words (and more, many, many more):

rein/reign
affect/effect
than/then
here/hear
buy/by
accept/except
weather/whether
there/their/they’re
to/too/two
you’re/your
bear/bare
one/won
brake/break
complement/compliment
aloud/allowed
lie/lay
it’s/its
capital/capitol
principle/principal
stationary/stationery
sight/site/cite
since/sense
our/hour
red/read
reed/read

. . . and many, many (MANY) more such. *sigh*

Now, someone might plead, “Oh, but that’s just a problem in vocabulary.” No. If someone does not know the meanings of the words they read or write, then they are really no better off than someone who cannot decode those funny lil squiggles to obtain the words they indicate. Worse off, in fact, because they may well erroneously think they are literate (because by the standards of “misunderedumacationism” they have been lied to, having been told they are–why! they have a piece or pieces of paper to prove it! #gagamaggot).

Fluency =/= literacy. A person may have a wide verbal vocabulary of words they understand and still be illiterate.

How to amend this? Reading a lot of well-written text authored by literate people can eradicate this sort of illiteracy. It’s either that or do what I did as a lad (along with reading a LOT of well-written text): read dictionaries–and not just one! And not just any dictionary, either. I have a shelf full of dictionaries, and I have found the ones published before the 1970s to be the more literate of the selections I have. *shrugs* Make of that what you will. Oh, and not just in English (for English readers, which I assume are the only readers of this blog). Having dictionaries on other language, including English-German, English-French, etc., can be useful in understanding WHY such homonyms as “reckless/wreckless” are very, very different words.

But still, reading well-written text from literate writers (while having a good dictionary by one’s side 😉 ) is the single best way to become literate, once one has mastered the relatively simple task of decoding those funny lil squiggles that stand in for phonemes in written text.


Sidebar: only peripherally related to literate vocabulary. Saw a website the other day by someone who cited their creds as “EDd”. Sorry, cupcake. If you have a doctorate in education, you ought to know that is denoted by EdD or Ed.D. But maybe the cred referred to is a doctorate in “[misunder]edumacationism.”


P.S. Yes, I am well aware that the dumbed down definition of “literacy” is well accepted. Of course it is. “Edumacationists” can’t defend their failure to promote real literacy, so the only definition such will accept is “can decode those funny lil squiggles, whether they can really understand the content or not.”

#gagamaggot

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