Literacy is a spectrum. Illiteracy–the inability to even puzzle out those funny lil squiggles on a page of text–is the on one end of the spectrum. Formal Literacy is on the other end of the spectrum. True illiteracy is an absolute. Formal literacy has no upper/outer boundaries. Material Literacy is being able to puzzle out those funny lil squiggles but having only a bare concept of their meanings. Subliteracy is just beyond that: having a material grasp of basic meanings imparted by those funny lil squiggles, but a poor grasp of historical or cultural implications and hence able to grasp only basic information in text, at best. There is quite a large overlap of Material Literacy and Subliteracy. Formal Literacy indicates a grasp of cultural and historical contexts, along with many different sorts of idioms, such that a simple citation of, say, Gresham’s Law by name only imparts a great deal of information or simply saying (or writing) “There is a tide [in the affairs of men]. . .” with no further citation calls to mind the context of that remark. Examples are legion, and my own attempt to attain formal literacy is always finding more such cultural enrichment to add to my lexicon.
Where folks who have never made the effort to even start becoming formally literate (As I implied, I’m still just past the starting blocks in my search for formal literacy, myself) demonstrate their failure to READ MANY BOOKS *heh* is in mangling idioms. Using “free reign” instead of the correct “free rein,” “come down the pipe” instead of the correct “come down the pike,” “chomps at the bit” instead of the correct “champs at the bit,” and other such things just indicates that whoever writes such things stopped expanding their literate vocabulary probably somewhere around fourth grade. Such folks write what they have heard (or misheard) from their (probably) similarly subliterate peers, and as an unwillingness to read well-written text seems endemic to society nowadays, I suspect subliteracy to remain ascendant.
(When commenting, please feel free to misuse words, abuse or neglect apostrophes, mangle syntax and grammar, or simply type, “TL;DR.” I wanna feel like I posted this on FarceBook.)
#le_sigh