Phractured Frases

Yes, I meant to write that. And I know that the words are “Fractured Phrases”. So, why? Simple. Most people I see and hear botching common words and phrases do so unwittingly. And therein lies a stealth danger to society, especially a society built, as ours once was, on shared cultural memes that cut across multiple imported ethnic and cultural traditions, enabling the kinds of cross-cultural communications that created the Melting Pot Society.

The single largest factors in the destruction of a healthy common culture here in the US are the growth of illiteracy* in the US and the Mass MEdia Podpeople Hivemind. The illiterate among us aren’t limited to those who cannot read at all but include those who simply do not read and those who, when they do read, read only crap and scarcely understand even that. Having not read much at all, they are easy prey for the lies about current events, history and civics that are the toxic stew served up daily by the Hivemind in entertainment (“news” and other crap on TV as well as movies and manufactured “music”) that is designed to misinform and twist values away from those which made America, at one time, a great nation.

But what’s this gripe I have against fractured phrases and words? Simple, really. I see an apparently growing trend toward the subliterate and illiterate who simply do not know the meanings of common words (look for consistent uses of “then” for “than” or “affect” for “effect” in a person’s writing, for a couple of common examples: subliterate tending toward illiterate) or are so lacking in grounding in any broader culture than the simplistic, twisted culture presented by the Hivemind that they botch even simple child’s games.

Really? Yes. I ran across a long, massively stupid, “discussion” on a social media site recently where someone asked why paper beats rock, rock beats scissors and scissors beats paper. About one in four answers made any sense at all. No, seriously. A failure of both basic literacy and any sense of a culture beyond the Hivemind. (BTW, rock-paper-scissors has been around for thousands of years. Apparently, it takes a modern American Hivemind-dominated culture to denude it of any coherence.)

Minor examples of a major problem. “Major problem” because these minor examples are much, much less than the tip of the iceberg.

Let me “aks” you *arrrgghhh!*, have you heard any of these illiterate usages recently?

Use “Calvary” when the speaker was referring to “cavalry”? (“Cavalry” comes to us via the French “cheval” for “horse” and its derivative, “cavalerie”–also French, thanks to the Norman invasion of England, which happened when exactly? Hmmm? 😉 “Calvary” of course refers to the place where Christ was crucified.)

“Doggy dog world” when the speaker means “dog-eat-dog world”?

Insult the Italian roots of the word by saying “expresso” for “espresso”?

Demonstrate profound illiteracy by saying “excetera” when meaning “et cetera” or “expecially” instead of “especially”?

How about one of my favorite gripes against illiterates: “FebYOUary” instead of “February”?

But those are just examples of word illiteracy–thoughtless, senseless ignorance and laziness. How about demonstrations of more powerful inability to reason at all?

“Can’t see the forest from the trees,” completely destroys the analogy that implies being bogged down in details and so missing the bigger picture.

“For all intensive purposes” is used by people who’ve never seen or heard “for all intents and purposes” used correctly, or if they have then have misunderstood or simply been stupidly unable to properly puzzle out the phrase, and so have no idea what they’re talking about. Just making meaningless sounds issuing from pie holes.

Use “escape goat” to demonstrate illiteracy and a complete lack of understanding of the once common cultural meme, “scapegoat” (which is itself derived from a three-millennia-old Jewish religious practice associated with what is now celebrated–differently–as Yom Kippur)? Once this deeply-rooted cultural meme was understood widely because even the unreligious among us were literate enough to know much of the cultural background of Western Civilization. Alas! No more… or at least less and less.

Examples of our fractured cultural memes abound–it would be too mild to call them Legion. (Yes, I intended to capitalize “Legion“. The curse seems demonic. *sigh* Yes, another largely lost, or obscured by the Hivemind, meme.)

E.D. Hirsch spoke to the problem of the loss of shared Western Civilization memes in his “Cliff Notes” version of Western Civ, Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know, but it was José Ortega y Gasett’s The Revolt of the Masses that accurately prophesied the state of cultural stupidity we live in today and its overarching cause. With apologies to Ortega for, urm, dumbing down his thesis, it is the dumbing down via the increasing over-democratization of society that has put us where we are today: on the back side of the hill, coasting faster and faster down toward a precipice with the fluid running out of our brakes.

Americans today are, by and large, Yangs**. (h.t. to my Wonder Woman, both for the reminder of that Star Trek episode and for being my “research librarian” and locating multiple references to the episode faster than I could. :-))

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*I do not accept the modern pejorated sense of “literate” which means, essentially, the ability to laboriously make out words represented by those funny little chicken scratches on a printed page, regardless whether the “reader” understands what they mean. Witness the most recent National Adult Literacy Survey, conducted by one of the top five most toxic “feddle gumment” departments, the Department of Education, which discovered that recent–at that time–college graduates were less literate than 10 years previously, and that, among other things, that only 31% of those headed for graduate school could even puzzle out the meanings of common labels.

**Yes, like many of the Star Trek episodes, the plot is stupid on many levels, but still… the portrayal of the Yangs so closely parallels the American sheeple of today that it’s eerie, isn’t it?

Note #3: Yes, this was another long, loosely (dis?)connected ramble. So? While there may be someone who will stumble across it and find it unintelligible after a painful deciphering of the electronic squiggles on their screen, only those who can understand it will actually read it.