In our progressively (yes, I meant the pun) dumbed-down society, “literacy” has come to mean simply being able to laboriously puzzle out the written word. That’s sad. For one thing, it means that people who are literate by that commonly-accepted definition can graduate from college without being able to puzzle out the meaning of the directions on a prescription pill bottle, a bus schedule or a dumbed-down (to supposed eighth-grade level) newspaper editorials.
There. Did I make that link hard enough to miss? 🙂 The data that article draws on is scarier than the article. If you search hard enough, you can find it. *heh* (Yeh, not doing folks’ homework for them on this one. I only want the ones who are… literate enough *heh* to be able to handle the info to get it. Snarky enough? Probably.)
But the problem is really worse than that. Maybe because we’ve become a society defined by the audio-visual media that is TV and radio more than anything else, the proliferation of markers demonstrating that even folks who can read, don’t, or (worse?) that when they do, they read dreck, slop, crap, really, really stupid and uninformed writers.
A very few examples will illustrate my point.
How often have you seen and heard people use “anniversary” to indicate something other than an annual event? “Two month anniversary” is a common example. What part of “anni”–from Latin, “anno” or YEAR–have these subliterate idiots missed?
Or, one I read recently from someone who is ill-read, but who listens to subliterate Hivemind podpeople enough to be dis-educated: “…for the light of me…” when the appropriate phrase was “for the LIFE of me”. Compound that with the multiple occurrences of such phrases as “woks of life,” “chester drawers” “intensive purposes” and a veritable Legion (and yes I meant that2 cultural reference *heh*) of other malaprops, stupidities and downright illiteracies, and we have a society progressing toward genuine illiteracy.
And what, pray, hath brought about this effusion of disgust for a growing illiteracy in our society? Why, the annual profusion of one of its most stupid examples: FEB-YOU-ARY.
*gag-spew*
It’s FebRUary, dumbasses.
Of course, in the mini-rant above, I did not place enough stress on one of the worst aspects of progressive illiteracy: who the illiterates listen to and “read”. As Mark Twain wisely said,
“The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them.”
Note the word, “good”. People who find books written by such as Dan Brown to be readable are people who have denied themselves the advantage of reading books that are well-written and so don’t even know that they are poking a metaphorical screwdriver into their forebrain and stirring. People who watch or read “news” (propaganda) promulgated by an increasingly subliterate Mass MEdia Podpeople Hivemind rarely twig to the fact that they are being enstupiated by doing so. (And yes, I know that the word “enstupiated” is used more often by me than by any other source known to Google. So? It’s a perfectly good neologism coined by John Stossel, IIRC. :-))
Of course, it’s a thorny problem. So many people have “gradumacated” from American public schools having been told they are”literate” that most do not even know that they are, at best, fumble-headed subliterates. Those few of us who twig to the fact that the “edumacation” system is seriously broken may figure out that we are technically literate subliterates and begin to take steps to correct the problem, but it’s a long, hard row to hoe (and a tip o’ the tam to Davy Crockett for being the first to record that phrase :-)). I’m still working on my literacy (the Lays of Ancient Rome and other works by Macaulay, among many, are still unscaled works, for example), and expect to continue to do so right up until my body’s ready to be cremated.
Most folks, it seems, surrender their literacy to the care (and poisoning) of others more interested in keeping them fat and stupid than anything else.
I hate to admit it, but literature has never really been high on my list of things important. The ability to understand what true literature I read though, that is important.
I find myself easily entertained though. I enjoy watching television and movies, and reading modern science fiction and fantasy works. I know that they aren’t really the food for intellectual growth that some of the masterworks of literature are, but that’s not really why I read them.
I LIKE being entertained. But, I also know that there’s much more to life than simply being entertained. The enstupiated masses though will probably never learn that until it’s too late.
Perri, Entertainment can be a Very Good Thing, if it is well done. The Odyssey was composed for entertainment and it achieves its aim admirably. Contrarily, Ulysses, by James Joyce, was written to be “literature” and succeeds as crap. Its only entertainment value is for intellectual analysis by people who wouldn’t know a well-told story if it dropped into their laps and told itself.
I once castigated Jerry Pournelle for denigrating his own novels as “just entertainment” and not “literature”. Well-written, literate entertainment is much, much more valuable, IMO, than self-consciously manufactured “literary works”.
Granted, some well-told stories stand the test of time and are so pregnant with meaning that endures across different ages that they qualify as great literature, but the “literary works” that were (and are) self-consciously written by 20th century (still 20th century even in the 21st) pseudo-intellectual hacks for other lame brains with no sense of story. See Holly Lisle’s summation, “How to Write Suckitudinous Fiction”.
Again, as Twain (a writer of sometimes GREAT but always GOOD entertainment) said, those who do not read GOOD books have no advantage over those who cannot…
Similarly, those who listen to or watch subliterate dreck* are performing auto-lobotomies on their higher brain functions. But the really thorny issue is that, since for the most part most Americans nowadays seem to not even KNOW there is such a thing as literacy that extends beyond simply being able to painfully puzzle words out of the hieroglyphs (possibly even having been taught–trained–to “read” via the “see-say” method) of written English or engaging an energetic troupe of monkeys to “write” a novel, how can these subliterates even know they are further damaging their brains by uncritically exposing themselves to more of the omnipresent toxic media?
*Holly Lisle makes a case that would, it seem to me, argue that highly literate, technically well-written suckitudinous fiction can be as bad as–perhaps worse than–pure dreck. I’d find that hard to argue. The arts in general seem to suffer from this malady: on the one hand pure, toxic crap and on the other hand toxic and pretentious crap. Examples might be rap presented and consumed as so-called “music”–pure toxic crap, both musically and as message. “Academic music”–pretentious “art for art’s sake” crap. Both fail on almost all points when stacked against the gold standard of the Principles of Classicism
Add to the sore lack of most or all of these elements in much of contemporary art (particularly music, but all the arts) the fact that when the arts do manage some artistry, it’s usually in the service of an unworthy aim and we have a recipe for not only the dumbing down of society to the lowest (and ever lower) common denominator but a coarser and lower quality citizenry as an end product.
BTW, I am SO easily amused–really! I chuckle every time I re-read, “It’s FebRUary, dumbasses.”
Yeh, I’m easy. So?
As of late, ‘subosebly’ has made ground in its attempt to supplant ‘supposedly’. Correcting the miscreants doesn’t work cuz they doesn’t care. I checked and it is still illegal to just shoot them. I checked.
That it’s illegal doesn’t make it not right. *heh*