Every now and then I see another piece of evidence that people simply do not read–or think.
“paper view”–the words heard when someone said “pay per view” in the presence of someone who doesn’t read and, apparently, has no idea what the words mean.
Dog Bites Man Redux
*yawn* Old, old news in new clothing. The subject line? “AP flunks science”. So? What else is new? Don Surber quotes the Associated Press:
NEW YORK (AP) — The extreme heat that’s been roasting the eastern U.S. is only expected to get worse, and residents are bracing themselves for temperatures near and above boiling point. [emphasis added]
Wow! That’s some heat wave! Temps near or above 212°F? 100°F would be boiling point for such highly flammable chemicals as acetaldehyde, but “boiling point” in normal parlance refers to the boiling point of water at standard pressure, 212°F.
But what can you expect from one of the chief Mass MEdia Podpeople Hivemind mouthpieces of The Cult of Anthropogenic Global Climate Scare-ism? Ordinary knowledge of common science? Nah. Never. Ain’t a-gonna happen on the AP’s watch!
Dumbasses.
Just One More Example
from the litter of our post-literate society:
“suaree”
While I admire creativity and good story telling, and I appreciate folks who put themselves and their work on the line, online, it does bother me a bit when I see repeated examples of this sort of evidence of a lack of literacy in someone who’s offering up an otherwise rollicking read. It’s not a typical misspelled word, and it’s certainly not a typo. No, it’s a word the author has heard but is not well read enough to ever have seen in print before (or at least not in something written by someone else who’s literate enough to know the word is “soiree“).
Oh, one example of such a thing is certainly not enough to bother me, or at least not enough to keep me from reading an otherwise well-told tale, and, frankly, in an unedited rough draft I’m more than willing to accept more than a few such problematic and weird spellings and even word usage errors (although instances of such things as the repeated use of “then” for “than” really grate [“greatly” *heh*] on my nerves *sigh*) in otherwise good yarns. Still, I wonder how such a person managed to get through high school or even eighth grade English… until I reconsider the state of pubschool education in these (dys)United States.
Oh, well. It takes a bit more work, but copy-pasting forum-published “fun-fic” into a file I can edit for grammar, usage and spelling corrections isn’t all that difficult. Really. *heh*
OTOH, when I read such things in a book that’s actually been through the eyes of proof readers and an editor and then made it to print, I do get a tad steamed.
In case you’d missed it, I do NOT accept “can laboriously decipher and sound out weird heiroglyphs” as “literacy” even though that seems to be the current “edumacational” definition…
And These People Are Allowed to Vote…
…no wonder we have the kleptocratic, anarcho-tyrannical “feddle gummint” kakistocracy we have. Massive ignorance (and shameful–WILFULL–stupidity) reign supreme in our society today.
Remember third world county’s corollary to Santayana’s Axiom:
“In a democracy (‘rule by mob’), those who refuse to learn from history are in the majority and dictate that everyone else suffer for their ignorance.”
More and more I’m convinced that truer words were never spoken.
One Small Example…
…of the stupidity of usual and customary modern (mis)”education” practices:
“Drill and kill.”
That’s a phrase used to deprecate dilling facts such as multiplication tables until they become second nature. Combine that with stupidly practiced positive reinforcement of “tender widdle egos” and we have such idiocies as congratulating ignorant little brats for “5×6=33” or ignorant and nearly illiterate college students who are super-confident of their intellectual prowess.
No, the proper view of drilling facts is:
“Drill to skill.”
Indeed, facts must be drilled, practiced, exercised regularly for quite some time before they can be useful and contribute to useful skills–or even by themselves be skills. Intellectual pursuits are non different in this regard than physical pursuits. Most pubschools have some sort of athletic teams. Are the kids just set out on the field and told to “just have fun” or do they have a coach who drills them in fundamentals and has them practices skill sets and play patterns?
The latter, of course. Apparently, pubschools view athletic endeavors as more important than intellectual ones, because in athletic endeavors, pubschools actually coach kids to attempt to be successful, having them practice and drill the skills they need until they are skills.
Or take an even simpler task. Has anyone ever seen any person just pick up a hammer for the very first time and drive a 10-penny nail in two (or maybe three) blows, perfectly straight with no problems? No, because it takes (usually) some minimal instruction (I can’t count the number of inexperienced adults I’ve seen simply holding a hammer incorrectly!) and lots and lots of practice.
Ditto for calculus or stats calculations or grammatically-written sentences or playing piano: (proper) practice yields skills that mere knowledge cannot. Of course, that’s one reason many “educators” deride such things: actually supervising such practice to assure what’s being learned is useful is often hard work (and I use the term derisively; teachers teach while “educators” are more often puffed-up, toxic drones who need an extra two syllables to assure themselves of their importance).
Disgust Redux
I’ve said it before, but I’m giving into the temptation to reiterate what runs through my mind every time I hear or read the phrase, “It’s only semantics”.
Semantics is the single most important thing about language. Without it, spoken language becomes nothing but (tautology alert!) meaningless whistles and clicks and moans and grunts and written language becomes nothing but weird squiggles, signifying nothing.
Now there abide these three:
Phonemes (sounds and their and written phoneme analogs)
Syntax (structure) and
Semantics (MEANING), and the greatest of these is semantics.
“It’s only (or just) semantics” is an utterance by an idiot, full of sound (and whimpering), signifying nothing* (at least nothing useful, save for confirming that the one saying it has no argument or defensible position).
Insincere apologies to The Bard and all that…
* Aside: For something with much,much more sense than the “nothing (useful) conveyed by the idiotic “It’s just semantics” try this disquisition on Nothing. Not all that edifying, but it did keep me in stitches for days after I first read it. Imagine breaking out in laughter in the middle of a Greek class. The prof was understanding once I had explained and shared the article with him. Nice guy.
Beating a Dead Horse
From the WaPo a few years ago (a 2006 repeat of a 2005 report), based on the 2003 Adult Literacy Survey by the DoE:
Experts Stunned – Literacy of US College Grads Declining
“The declining impact of education on our adult population was the biggest surprise for us, and we just don’t have a good explanation,” said Mark S. Schneider, commissioner of education statistics. “It may be that institutions have not yet figured out how to teach a whole generation of students who learned to read on the computer and who watch more TV. It’s a different kind of literacy.”
“What’s disturbing is that the assessment is not designed to test your understanding of Proust, but to test your ability to read labels,” he added.
Yep, reading and understanding “labels” was about what the “proficient” level denoted. Sad. That’s “proficient”? Hardly.
*sigh*
Of course, this article from the Georgia State University student newspaper notes a couple of things most of the educrats (they’re all very naturally baffled, the idiots) who’ve commented on the situation have missed. First, more and more illiterate sluggards are getting into colleges, having graduated high school with the reading skills of gerbils. And then this:
“…perhaps the failure lies in the lack of support for library services in schools in the United states, where the first place for funding and staff cuts is the school library.”
Well, there is a wide and deep constellation of other contributing causes, but what the student writer noted here is a fact of pubschool life.
Oh, *yawn*–Dog Bites Man
Is anyone surprised?
“The United States now ranks near the bottom of the list of advanced economies for its high school dropout rate — 23.3 percent of American students do not receive a high school diploma.”
The really distressing thing is that at least 70% of those who do graduate probably shouldn’t have. After all, if 70% of college grads don’t have the literacy skills to read their way out of a paper bag, what does that say for prior “education accomplishments”? What? Most high school grads only go to college to get lobotomies?
Nah. They got those while in pubschool.
Note: I’m not asserting they had their lobotomies performed by the pubschools alone. No, students’ parents, the Mass MEdia Podpeople Hivemind and many other elements all work together to accomplish this task. With the full cooperation of the students, for the most part.
Why, If In Days of Yore…
…God could speak to his prophet through the mouth of an ass (and a hinny-ass at that *heh* Numbers 22:22-35), why, oh, why can’t those who today claim to speak for Him at least use good grammar?
“Future Earthquake Warning” Mega-Quake of epic proportions to hit the America’s? [sic]
[Note: No, I’m not linking it. The article turns up in a Google search under that title, but I see no sense in providing it linkage.]
And not only does the blogger at “Now the End Begins” (a blog supposedly about “end times Bible prophecy”) pose the nonsensical “Mega-Quake of epic proportions to hit the America’s? [sic]” but she repeats it as a statement (“It is a warning that the America’s [sic] are in danger of suffering a mega-quake of catastrophic proportions during the next forteen [sic] days… “) in her initial paragraph.
Now, why would I feel I need to place much confidence in some gal’s interpretation of “end times prophecy” if she’s not taken the trouble to learn to write English literately? What assurance would this give me that she could actually understand those scriptures she reads and attempts to explicate? Heck, I had a grandfather who ended his formal schooling in the eighth grade to go work in the Oklahoma oil fields (since pay was so very much better than continuing to work a tenant farm in SW Missouri, and he had a mother to support), and his writing, as evidenced by the hundreds of pages of manuscripts he two-finger typed that I have read, was freer of grammatical nonsense than this gal’s.
It just makes me tired to read such things. The blogger at Now the End Begins is probably a nice enough person, and certainly as literate as most Mass MEdia Podpeople, but of course, that’s damning with faint praise, hardly a ringing endorsement. That her source for this “the sky is falling!” post is some anonymous guy wearing a tin foil hat (one of the other articles at her source trumpets, “27 Signs That The Nuclear Crisis In Japan Is Much Worse Than Either The Mainstream Media Or The Japanese Government Have Been Telling Us” *feh*) is yet another reason to look askance at this doomsday post. Add to that simple statements of wrong “facts” (labels the Japan quake as a “7.3” Richter Scale event, for example) and my inducement to read the blog further wanes even more quickly.
Still, rather than reject the content out of hand, in action that would smack of ad hominem fallacy (just because the clock’s broken doesn’t mean it can’t be right twice a day, and blind pigs do find acorns now and then), I’ll look into it a bit. After all, we could experience a tsunami here in SW Missouri, what with that New Madrid fault and all. *heh*
(Of course that was sarcasm. First of all, the geography/geology of the New Madrid fault means that likely damage even from an 8.0-scale quake wouldn’t extend to my area, and besides, where’s the ocean in SW Missouri that would lead to a tsunami? ;-))
In only peripherally-related events…
As counter to such Chicken Littles, here’s a recent (Monday) comment from Jerry Pournelle that pretty well sums up my view of the Chicken Little reporting on the Japanese nuclear plant woes:
I note that although there have been bi-hourly announcements of the impending meltdowns of the Japanese power plants, the latest headlines tell me that the Japanese are struggling to prevent disaster. When it comes to numbers, perhaps ten atomjacks (plant workers) have been hurt, no one has been killed, and fewer than 100 people off site have been exposed to some elevated level of radiation. There have been small releases of gasses.
This is not Chernobyl or even above ground nuclear weapons testing. This isn’t even a mine disaster or a school bus destroyed by a coal-carrying freight train. It’s a disaster but it’s mostly economic. A coal fired plant routinely emits annually far more radiation (there are radioactive ores in coal; not many but not zero) than will have been released when this is over. Or so it seems to me.
The disaster in Japan is caused by flood and earthquake. Concentration on the nuclear bit is political.
Indeed.
Pournelle continued to talk sense on Tuesday. Dutch Boy. Dike. *sigh*
Of course, at least some of the Mass MEdia Podpeople Hivemind have a clue. From The Register (UK):
Fukushima is a triumph for nuke power: Build more reactors now!
Quake + tsunami = 1 minor radiation dose so far
Now, if only ABCCBSNBCCNFOXMSNBC, The New York Slimes (et al), politicians like Joe !@#$%^& Lieberman, etc., would all just STFU (or die or whatever would be best), perhaps voices of reason could prevail.
I’m not holding my breath.
BTW, I’m well aware of the tongue-in-cheek “grammar fallacy of argument” which, roughly, states that any post or comment that criticizes the grammar, spelling, word usage, etc., of another post or comment will likely contain multiple egregious errors of grammar, spelling, word usage, etc.”
*heh*
Still, just to “prove” (as in “test”–“The exception that proves [tests] the rule”) that rule, I submitted the text above to three separate grammar checkers and the only “errors” found were either genuine errors in the text I quoted from the blogger I (too gently) excoriated and errors that… weren’t errors in my text. The non-errors in my text that were found by two of the grammar checkers were:
- the use of contractions (not preferred in formal writing, which this blog is not)
- word usages which were what I actually intended to say (such as “course” in “of course” which one grammar checker suggested I might want to replace with “coarse”–an obvious error by the grammar checker)
All that illustrates is the dangers of folks trusting spelling and grammar checkers. It’s better to be able to rely on knowing how to spell, and how to write and speak good English. 🙂
I will note that, somewhere in the text above, I missed placing a comma where one rightly belongs to offset an appositive, and I added two commas that some orthographists would disagree with. Brownie points to those who find those. And a big, “Shame on you for wasting time doing that!” sign to them as well. *heh*
Civilization is more fragile than most believe
Jerry Pournelle notes:
Civilization is more fragile than most believe. Note that a true dark age comes not when we lose the ability to do something, but forget that we ever had that ability: as for instance no university Department of Education seems aware that in the 1930’s to the end of World War II, essentially the only adult illiterates in the United States were people who had never been to school to begin with (see the Army’s tests of conscripts). My mother had a 2-year Normal School degree and taught first grade in rural Florida, not considered a high intelligence population. I once asked her if any of her students left first grade without learning to read. She said, “Well, there were a few, but they didn’t learn anything else, either.” The notion that a child could get out of elementary school unable to read was simply shocking up to about 1950 when new University Education Department theories of reading emerged. Now a majority of students read “below grade level”…
Oh, it’s far worse than that, Dr. Pournelle, if the results of the Adult Literacy Survey of 2003 aren’t reversed soon:
Literacy experts and educators say they are stunned by the results of a recent adult literacy assessment, which shows that the reading proficiency of college graduates has declined in the past decade, with no obvious explanation…
The test measures how well adults comprehend basic instructions and tasks through reading — such as computing costs per ounce of food items, comparing viewpoints on two editorials and reading prescription labels. Only 41 percent of graduate students tested in 2003 could be classified as “proficient” in prose — reading and understanding information in short texts — down 10 percentage points since 1992. Of college graduates, only 31 percent were classified as proficient — compared with 40 percent in 1992.
Do note the simplicity of the tasks tested. Other text samples in the test were extracts from a bus schedule, a newspaper editorial and a prescription med label, all of which proved too daunting for an overwhelming majority of college graduates.
With a basic reading skill set like this, is it any wonder that the ISI’s survey of civics literacy indicates such a abysmal grasp of basic civics in our adult population–most especially in college graduates?
More interesting, although I have posted similar posts for five years or so now, I have yet to read a defense of public education here–even when my traffic was regularly in quadruple digits several years ago–that was… literate.
See “The National Assessment of Adult Literacy” (PDF file) for more–especially if the background data is still available (I didn’t check, but sometimes such things are… redacted, shall we say, to be less embarrassing when the actual data isn’t as rosy as the particular government department wishes to portray. If such proves to be the case, I may be able to find a copy of what I read several years ago.)
Addendum: I debated using this linked info in my comments above but decided against it because of the subliterate use of terms I found in it, for example, “Over all [sic], the average prose and document literacy scores for Americans were basically flat between 1992 and 2003… ” The proper term for discussing the limits of the scores between the denoted boundaries of “1992-2003” is “overall” not “over all”. *sigh* But still, I find the following paragraph delicious:
Based on their scores, participants in the survey were deemed to have “basic,” “intermediate” or “proficient” literacy (Whitehurst noted that a National Research Council committee that recommended the literacy levels initially called the highest level “advanced,” but that department officials ultimately concluded that the skills required for that category — comparing viewpoints in two editorials, for instance, or calculating the cost per ounce of different grocery items — weren’t really all that advanced.)
“[W]eren’t really all that advanced”? Indeed. And that’s the level that only 31% reached. Barely above mouth-breathers who’ve been chemically lobotomized.