"In a democracy (‘rule by mob’), those who refuse to learn from history will be the majority and will dictate that everyone else suffer for their ignorance."
Whether one considers social networking forums, specialty forums focused on whatever topic, blogs, or even professional “news” outlets and “scholarly” articles posted on the Internet, I’ve come to the conclusion that well over half the people that present themselves as English speakers would benefit greatly from buying and religiously using Rosetta Stone English Level 1 for as long as it takes to master basic–very basic–English.
That is all.
*sigh* It’s just one more thing in a long, long list of dirty laundry issuing from an increasingly dumbed down popular culture, but it’s one of those things that irk me even more than people who have apparently been jamming a fork behind their eyeballs and stirring long enough to miss the first R in FebRuary. *sigh*
Whadafug you talkin’ ’bout, Willis?
OK, I’ll just let that one slide and answer the question anyway.
This A.M. I woke hearing a children’s song–well, almost always sung as a children’s song–in my mind’s ear. A real earworm the thing is. Anywho, After a couple of hours, I thought, “Hmm, Self, I wonder if folks have posted any YouTube videos of this song?” So, in answer to my question to Self, I did what any moderately curious person asking such a question of Self might do and input a lil searcherooo.
Yep. Lots of folks have posted videos of the song, and of the first page of searches returned EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM RENDERS THE TUNE DIFFERENTLY AND ALL OF THEM WRONG. “Why,” I asked Myself, “would these people who can play guitar or piano (well, keyboard) get the tune wrong–sometimes by one note in a phrase, sometimes by several?”
They’re illiterate. The song isn’t some folk song but has an actual composer and actual written music and lyrics still under copyright. Sure, anyone can get a mechanical license to produce a version of the song, but any even semi-musically-literate person should AT LEAST be able to GET THE NOTES RIGHT–at least ONCE!
Searching instead for the first recording of the song–by Peggy Lee of all folks!–yields someone who WAS musically literate actually singing the notes that Arthur Hamilton wrote:
Any moderately musically literate person will hear many, many examples of performers (I refuse to call them “artists”) rendering otherwise well-known tunes wrong–usually in ways that limit the range of notes, narrowing the tune to eliminate intervals that either the singer or his audience can’t discern.
Yeh, yeh, it’s just a kids’ song, and most of the other music butchered by pop ears and performances is just pop fluff, but it’s also another area where our culture is getting dumber and dumber.
Think about two common meanings of “dumb” there. When the culture becomes UNABLE to express certain things because it’s both dimmer-witted–lacking the wit to express something–and “mute” as it were, lacking the actual means of expressing a thing, then that area of the culture is drifting into a “dark age” where not onl;y does it not know how to do something but it is losing the memory of once being able to do a thing.
And it’s not just music that this applies to in our culture, folks. A widespread Dark Age coming. . . maybe.
Sure, when I was a wee tad, I occasionally heard strange word pronunciations (strange to my ear because I lived in a somewhat literate family environment and began reading at an early age), like “warsh rag” for “wash cloth” (“warsh” never seemed to be accompanied by “cloth” for some reason) and “drore” for “drawer”. Somehow, though, I was never exposed during my formative years to people who simply could not pronounce the months of the year correctly. Hence my least favorite month of the year, a time of the year nowadays when I have to continually bite my tongue to keep from shouting
What? Oh, this article about the feds making those who unlock their dumb phones criminals. Sure, the info is pretty much useless to Olde Phartes like me who just use a cell phone to make calls (don’t try calling my cell phone, cos I won’t answer), but it’s interesting nonetheless.
Still, how many times can one read something like,
“There’s more than a few ways around this. . . “
. . . without gagging and searching for a way to dopeslap, then tar, feather and hang the author from the highest tree?
There ARE. . . ways, idiot. Count it out. Plural. Got it? (No. He can’t count and can’t parse a simple sentence in English. Typical Hiveminder.)
Continue reading “Apart From Innumeracy and Grammar Failures, Moderately Interesting. . .”
I have a disability that is a constant burden. In my daily walk of life, it causes me many, many difficulties that weigh me down, reduce my ability to work or even have enjoyment of life. It’s severe and debilitating.
I simply caNOT understand–or many times even remember–that most people LIKE being stupid, ignorant and blind to the world around them.
Most people cannot (solely because they don’t want to take the vanishingly small effort to do so) understand that
x+y=z, therefore z-y=x
. . .or that a basic grasp of such things are, in the very a natural, ordinary and proper human existence, useful in so very many ways that if one were to stop to list them there would likely not be enough (electronic) ink to do so.
And that’s just scratching the surface of things most people do not even take for granted, because they remain obstinately blind to them.
But it’s not just that basic, almost first grade level, algebra’s usefulness in kitchen management, carpentry, shopping and much, much more eludes them (because they are too intellectually lazy to be able to win a game of checkers against a head of cabbage), no, it’s not just that. It’s also that such folks view any use of very simple math extending beyond extremely basic addition and subtraction as magic, only invoke via calculators of some sort. (But then, such folks also do not usually even understand the formulae they must use to input data into a calculator beyond simple multiplication, division, addition and subtraction.)
My disability is that I just do not get that.
Algebra, statistics (and the calculus necessary to understand how statistical formulae work; without that, one is far too easily manipulated by phony statistics. . . just sayin’), gemoetry, etc., are all extremely useful tools–as ways of thinking about our world around us–for anyone wishing to
save money
save time
save effort
. . . that it boggles my mind that so very, very many not only are utterly incapable of even seeing the daily multitudes of applications of simple maths like algebra and geometry but are actually dismissive of such simple maths as non-utilitarian (though few such folks would even understand what I just wrote).
I have tried and tried, but my disability seems to prevent getting my head around that mindset.
So, when a salesman (of construction materials in the case that came to mind) clicks away on a calculator and comes up with something that simply cannot be, given the physical constraints of a job, the materials involved, etc., because he unthinkingly applied the wrong sets of criteria AND improperly applied a wrong formula, pencil and paper proofs might not be enough to demonstrate the flaws. . . and searches at that business for someone who DOES understand what the problems are might go all the way to the top of the food chain (as it did; the owner of the business understood the simple maths involved *sigh*). One out of four persons (two out of five, including me), 25% (or, if I were included in the population count there, 40%) could do the simple math.
That’s pretty typical. When I’m in the room, the number of folks getting simple math goes up. When I leave, the general IQ drops. No, seriously, and I’m not really all that smart or math-or-letters-literate*. Really. About half my extended family, for just one population sample, can better me there. And while the IQ scores I was once a bit ambivalent about (I turned down an invite to a local chapter of MENSA while in college–issued by a psych prof who had a legitimate access to my records–because I just didn’t, and still don’t, feel that smart”) say I should be bright enough to grasp why people choose to be dumb, I just still don’t see it.
Shouldn’t I be getting some sort of disability payment from the nanny state for this painful, disabling disability?
As I have often said here, I read a lot. No, more than what most folks think is “a lot”–much more. I have done for a little over 56 years now, and as a result have read a few thousand more books alone than anyone else I have yet met.
Now, that’s not in any way some sort of boasting, just a setting of the stage, as it were, OK? In fact, such addiction to reading is nothing to boast about at all, and, like other addictions, it has some undesirable or even simply irritating consequences.
One of the consequences of so very much reading is that I’ve observed a general diminution of literate use of English (I don’t read much in other languages any more and haven’t for a couple of decades *shrugs* It’s just worked out that way) in more and more recent works, and not just in the recent deluge of self-published (or “indie”) books. I’ll just cite one example of many in a recent book that I finished despite the fact that I wrote deprecating margin notes at least once per page, sometimes as many as four per page, expressing my disgust at egregious word misuses, inexcusable grammar errors, etc. The example?
“He was the exception that proves the rule,” misused to mean, in context of the rest of the passage, that this exceptional person demonstrated the validity of a particular “rule” by violating it and succeeding anyway.
*sigh*
That alone would have convinced me of the author’s obstinate, arrogant, obdurate incuriosity and ignorance. (Don’t assail me for redundancy–obstinate/obdurate. I’d add more synonyms with slightly variant meanings, but you have your own Thesaurus *heh*) Many, many decades ago, or so it seems to me now *heh*, I wondered at a use of “prove” that puzzled my childhood brain, as it did not seem to match up with the meaning I knew–show the truth of a thing via evidence or argument.
Bring ye all the tithes into the storehouse, that there may be meat in mine house, and prove me now herewith, saith the LORD of hosts, if I will not open you the windows of heaven, and pour you out a blessing, that there shall not be room enough to receive it. — Malachi 3:10
As my curious search discovered then (thank heavens for a LARGE “library” style two-volume dictionary in our family library), “prove” is used in the verse as translated in the KJV text above to mean “test”. And just so is “prove” used in the phrase, “exception that proves (tests) the rule.”
And so is the richness and diversity of the English language–a language of which it has been said that it’s quite happy to drag other languages into a dark alley to mug ’em for as little as a useful participle–degraded by thousands upon thousands of subliterate, dim-witted, incurious dumbasses who never bother to read outside their own little box and so never discover that what they “know” just ain’t so. . . in spades, doubled and redoubled.
BTW, the book that garnered so much red ink from me is one I became convinced was written, proof-read and edited by a congress of bare-assed baboons. I had to cleanse my mental palate with some Shakespeare.
Well, not an auspicious beginning to the New Year. I decided to clear out the underbrush in my ebook backlog a bit and started in reading some books I’d been meaning to get to for a while.
So far, it’s not noon, yet, and I’ve started three of ’em. Put two down. Deleted them from my devices. Not going to finish them.
An example: after wading through multiple problems in noun-verb agreement, pronoun confusion and even misuse–“their” for “its” one too many times in descriptive narrative (not dialog, where it is remotely possible I might excuse such things, depending on the character), for one, and anachronisms in a 1920s setting–I saw “balled out” used for “scolding” and just couldn’t take any more of that book.
And this was an ebook from an established publishing house, not an “indie” so there were NO possible excuses for such incompetent editing. Are there just fewer and fewer literate “proofreaders” and editors, or are publishing houses just shoving unedited “advance reader copies” out the door, thinking that ebook readers are less literate than hardcopy readers?
Maybe it’s even worse, but I don’t want to contemplate that. *sigh*
So now I’m reading a book that was touted/blurbed as sci-fi which appears to really be a “slapstick comedy sci-fi romance novel”. *sigh* Please, next time just give an accurate description. At least it’s amusing and written halfway literately.
*sigh* At least I have more than a few hardcopy books also stacked up in my “to read” list to take refuge in–books not published in these days of illiterate boob “proofreaders/editors”.
I see a dumbass construction so often that I now just gag, spew and go on. *sigh* Here’s the situation: a writer (or speaker) is attempting to say
“Some members of [Class A] are also [Class B]; some are not.”
But they write/say,
“All [Class A] are not [Class B],” as in, “…a distribution center was set up under a former S4 proving that all S4s are not lame-brain[…s].”
What the author said there is not what he meant, if the preceding text (wherein it had been asserted that S4s are characteristically “lame-brained”) is to be believed. No, what the author meant was very distinctly different to what he wrote, namely, “…a distribution center was set up under a former S4 proving that not all S4s are lame-brain[…s].”
It’s NOT a subtle difference at all. It is a profound difference. “All are not” is NOT “Not all are” by any stretch of the imagination. One says very plainly, “NONE of A are B” and the other says, “Some of A are not B.”
This kind of widely-spread lack of sense in writing and speaking says to me that those who use these formulations have a logic circuit that’s broken, or firing only intermittently. This sort of widely-spread butchering of sense in language is a definite indicator that popular culture is, simply and bluntly put, stupid.
Romney’s message was fine. It was not as conservative or hard-hitting as I might have liked, but it was good, strong and put forth ideas that would have been seriously beneficial as first steps to restoring some sort of sensibility in the federal machine.
It was widely and loudly misrepresented by Barry Soetoro’s unofficial campaign (the Mass MEdia Podpeople Hivemind), which is where most people–especially those who don’t really do their own homework but rely on the media to do their thinking for them–got their view of his message.
Romney was “out-messaged” almost 10-to-1 by the steady drumbeat from “Bylines for Barry”–the so-called “legacy media” which served Barry by unrelentingly lying, obfuscating and distracting from anything of substance, anything true and just and worthy and praiseworthy in those opposed to Barry’s policies and actions and by incessant lies and obfuscations about Barry’s policies and actions.
And then there’s the “Stupid Factor”. Face it: America is NOT Lake Wobegone. The electorate is NOT “all above average”. In fact, if multi-year, well-designed surveys run by ISI have any validity at all (and the actual data in the NALS from the fedgov Dept of Ed are useful for anything) and multiple other metrics, surveys and even just common observation by well-informed and literate individuals, Americans, on average, are virtually illiterate as to civics, economics and current events–let alone simply NOT understanding the printed word.
Add to that the massive, pervasive voter fraud and blatantly illegal activity almost entirely engaged in by Dhimmicraps alone, and it’s almost miraculous that Romney/Ryan came within a hair of winning, let alone that Republicans held the House.
The only way to win against such massive odds against is to seriously improve the ground game, turn out a vote that is so large it doesn’t matter that they cheat and (metaphorically) BURN DOWN THE HIVEMIND’S HOUSE.
All that said, I am going to be much, much more gracious in defeat than the Dhimmicraps were in 2000 and 2004. In other words, I will unceasingly hammer every single damn*d lie issuing from leftists’ organs, NEVER shut up about Benghazi, Fast & Furious, et al, encourage everyone I know to hammer at these through their congresscritters, etc. And… encourage LOCAL involvement to begin NOW to get the ground game going for 2014 and exert as much influence on local, state and national nomination procedures for ALL elective offices.
The People CAN take back their government, but with the deck stacked against them, it’ll take a lot more work than it might have 60 years ago when Robert Heinlein wrote the book on how to do it (“Take Back Your Government!” bundled here in ebook formats with the Sharon Cooper and Chuck Asay book, “Taxpayers’ Tea Party: A Manual for Reclaiming Our Government”. Highly recommended.)
N.B. Edited out some typos. You’re welcome.
While I appreciate the effort my health plan providers make to keep me informed of benefits, I do with they’d hire better-trained parrots to write the notices.
“Please note that all pharmacies may not be providing… “
Really? “[A]ll pharmacies” followed by “may not”? Nonsensical*, but if the parrot were better-trained, it might have pecked out,
“Please note that not all pharmacies may be providing… “
…although the passive voice construction in this case is an abomination. A better construction altogether would have helped clarity and, probably, have avoided mocking, but then,
“For additional information about this benefit, please see the frequently asked questions on the reverse side of this letter,” would have assured loud guffaws and raucous mocking anyway. The “reverse side of this letter” was, of course, blank.
Idiots.
*Semantics (meaning) is not as sensitive to syntax in English as in some languages, but this is one of a significant class of examples where it is.