Category: Literacy

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Not Just Sloppy Writing

The two people credited in a byline for an article that included the following should be whipped with a dangling participle, along with any editor who passed on their work:

“…the recently re-ignited 40-year-old cold case that has haunted the FBI for years.”

?!? OK, I don’t get paid to write anything, but even I know that is unnecessarily awkward. How about, “…the recently re-ignited cold case that has haunted the FBI for 40 years” instead? It’s even easier to write than the other, too. Clarity, simplicity, brevity: watchwords for reporters to observe carefully, IMO.

Of course, now that I think of it, where would the “journalists” of today find such writing to emulate? (And I’ll admit they’d not find it here, but then I don’t take anyone’s money for this gig.)

Just another small piece of the “literacy means more than just being able to painfully puzzle out those weird chicken scratches on paper” puzzle, along with idiot Hiveminders who don’t know such things as the difference between “affect” and “effect” or “than” and “then” (and don’t pretend you haven’t seen such abortions of literacy in print or heard them from Podpeople Pie Holes).

Such people don’t even qualify as subliterates in my book. That would be giving them too much credit.

OK, OK, these sorts of things have been around forever, I suppose. I just notice them more and more often nowadays. But… re-reading (and taking very little time to do so *heh*) a book from the so-called “Golden Age of Science Fiction” authored by one of its pillars, I ran across,

“…according to their desserts.”

Where the author meant, “according to their deserts.”

Yes, the first instance is incorrect and the second is correct. Check me, if you wish. I’ll wait. 🙂

OK, back now?

Now, that incorrect word usage may have been a slip of the typewriter 61 years ago, though since I’m conversant with this author’s work in print, and he was more literate than 99% of fair-to-middlin’-to-pretty darned good contemporary authors, even given the space opera-ish tone of his work, I suspect an error in transcription crept in along the way to the eBook edition.

And naturally, it went flying right past any proofreader or editor with nary a pause.

Chaps my gizzard, it does… *heh*

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Another One from The Aliterate Society

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.

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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.

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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…

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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.

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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).

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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.

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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.

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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.