Category: Education

Posted on

Is Literacy Moribund in These [Dis]United States?

I see it all the time, but again today some “misunderedumacated” subliterate stuck on the lefthand side of the Dunning-Kruger Curve pontificated on a subject he was–of course–completely unqualified (because of his ignorance) to comment on, and while doing so misused “wreckless,” because (again, of course) he did not know the differences between “reckless” and “wreckless.” Such subliterate (or really, by any reasonable standard, illiterate) people almost always misuse all or some of the following words (and more, many, many more):

rein/reign
affect/effect
than/then
here/hear
buy/by
accept/except
weather/whether
there/their/they’re
to/too/two
you’re/your
bear/bare
one/won
brake/break
complement/compliment
aloud/allowed
lie/lay
it’s/its
capital/capitol
principle/principal
stationary/stationery
sight/site/cite
since/sense
our/hour
red/read
reed/read

. . . and many, many (MANY) more such. *sigh*

Now, someone might plead, “Oh, but that’s just a problem in vocabulary.” No. If someone does not know the meanings of the words they read or write, then they are really no better off than someone who cannot decode those funny lil squiggles to obtain the words they indicate. Worse off, in fact, because they may well erroneously think they are literate (because by the standards of “misunderedumacationism” they have been lied to, having been told they are–why! they have a piece or pieces of paper to prove it! #gagamaggot).

Fluency =/= literacy. A person may have a wide verbal vocabulary of words they understand and still be illiterate.

How to amend this? Reading a lot of well-written text authored by literate people can eradicate this sort of illiteracy. It’s either that or do what I did as a lad (along with reading a LOT of well-written text): read dictionaries–and not just one! And not just any dictionary, either. I have a shelf full of dictionaries, and I have found the ones published before the 1970s to be the more literate of the selections I have. *shrugs* Make of that what you will. Oh, and not just in English (for English readers, which I assume are the only readers of this blog). Having dictionaries on other language, including English-German, English-French, etc., can be useful in understanding WHY such homonyms as “reckless/wreckless” are very, very different words.

But still, reading well-written text from literate writers (while having a good dictionary by one’s side 😉 ) is the single best way to become literate, once one has mastered the relatively simple task of decoding those funny lil squiggles that stand in for phonemes in written text.

Sidebar: only peripherally related to literate vocabulary. Saw a website the other day by someone who cited their creds as “EDd”. Sorry, cupcake. If you have a doctorate in education, you ought to know that is denoted by EdD or Ed.D. But maybe the cred referred to is a doctorate in “[misunder]edumacationism.”

P.S. Yes, I am well aware that the dumbed down definition of “literacy” is well accepted. Of course it is. “Edumacationists” can’t defend their failure to promote real literacy, so the only definition such will accept is “can decode those funny lil squiggles, whether they can really understand the content or not.”

#gagamaggot

Posted on

Rights: Whence Come They?

Sidebar: I avoid terms like “gun rights,” because the real issue is the inherent right of every individual to defend one’s own life and limb against an aggressor (individual or group) doing or threatening to do harm, and to defend his loved ones and the otherwise defenseless innocent from the same. Guns are just one of many tools (excellent and effective tools, indeed often the best of tools, but one of many) for effecting legitimate self-defense.

I also do not like the terms “constitutional rights” or “2nd Amendment right” for similar reasons, but expanding to include the fact that those rights which arementioned in the constitution are mentioned only to prevent infringement of those rights by the federal government.

Posted on

Contemporary Illiteracy, Illustrated

While examples of illiteracy abound in Mass MEdia Podpeople Hivemind “reporting,” books–whether published by traditional publishing venues or self-pub writers–and social media (a rich, rich field to mine for examples), almost nothing beats so-called “memes”1 for a steady supply of illiterate text. Example:

The “meme” featured above was apparently composed by a “misunderedumacated” product of “public education” (A.K.A. “prisons for kids”). The abbreviation for “second” is “2nd,” not “2ed.” Oh, and standard English orthography does NOT have a space between the last word in a sentence and the punctuation closing the sentence, and a question should be punctuated with a question mark, not an exclamation mark. Those practices are reserved for those who never became literate.

But I am sure the reader can supply many, many such examples of folks proudly displaying their illiteracy in “memes” they hope will spread (and infect others with their illiterate text).

1meme: “an idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture,” or at least that was the meaning when Richard Dawkins coined the word. Since, stupid people have misused it enough that a secondary meaning has become accepted by many as the only meaning they are (illiterately) aware of: “amusing or interesting item (such as a captioned picture or video) or genre of items that is spread widely online especially through social media,” and further devolved to mean some graphic/text combo that some illiterate boob hopes will spread. . . #gagamaggot

Posted on

Losing Meaning, Impoverishing Communication, #9,386 (of countless examples)

From The Online Etymology Dictionary:

“apocalypse (n.)

“late 14c., “revelation, disclosure,” from Church Latin apocalypsis “revelation,” from Greek apokalyptein “uncover, disclose, reveal,” from apo “off, away from” (see apo-) + kalyptein “to cover, conceal,” from PIE root *kel- (1) “to cover, conceal, save.” The Christian end-of-the-world story is part of the revelation in John of Patmos’ book “Apokalypsis” (a title rendered into English as pocalipsis c. 1050, “Apocalypse” c. 1230, and “Revelations” by Wyclif c. 1380).

“Its general sense in Middle English was “insight, vision; hallucination.” The meaning “a cataclysmic event” is modern (not in OED 2nd ed., 1989); apocalypticism “belief in an imminent end of the present world” is from 1858. As agent nouns, “author or interpreter of the ‘Apocalypse,'” apocalypst (1829), apocalypt (1834), and apocalyptist (1824) have been tried.”

Posted on

THE Quintessential Liberal on Education and the State

John Stuart Mill, the liberal no contemporary pseudo-“liberal” would ever agree with,

“Were the duty of enforcing universal education once admitted, there would be an end to the difficulties about what the State should teach, and how it should teach, which now convert the subject into a mere battle-field for sects and parties, causing the time and labour which should have been spent in educating, to be wasted in quarrelling about education. If the government would make up its mind to require for every child a good education, it might save itself the trouble of providing one. It might leave to parents to obtain the education where and how they pleased, and content itself with helping to pay the school fees of the poorer classes of children, and defraying the entire school expenses of those who have no one else to pay for them. [Emphasis added] The objections which are urged with reason against State education, do not apply to the enforcement of education by the State, but to the State’s taking upon itself to direct that education: which is a totally different thing. That the whole or any large part of the education of the people should be in State hands, I go as far as any one in deprecating.”

THAT is the genuinely liberal position on education. Tyrannical statists masquerading as “liberals” want to compel people into a lockstep propaganda machine.

Posted on

The Pernicous Effects of A-Literacy

A Politico article (that, coincidentally, was about another aspect of Hivemind stupidity) provided another example of the pernicious results of a particular kind of a-literacy combined with the writer’s bubblegum soul being firmly, adamantly affixed to the lefthand side of the Dunning-Kruger Curve: the inability to perceive any differences in form between a verb’s simple past form and its past perfect form, though this isn’t quite as bad as the more typical inability to know when the past perfect is called for.

Oh, yeh, the presenting problem? The writer stupidly wrote “had sowed.” No, puppy. Only illiterates talk or write that way. The misuse is not even popular enough in English to qualify for “nonstandard” (that is, “stupid”) status.

This just in: yet ANOTHER pernicious effect of a-literacy: ignorance of commonly-known facts, viz. . .

Proud momma reporting (on FarceBook) on her son’s prom date with a girl named. . . Candida. *head-desk* No, I kid you not. No screenshot; no attribution whatsoever. Not even I would be that cruel. But the girl’s mother certainly was cruel when she named her. It would have been less cruel to simply have named her daughter, “Fungus.”

*sigh*

Posted on

It’s the Little Things #8,492

#sigh

*heh*

OK, now that that is out of my system. . .

Some of the absolutely stupid things some writers do baffle me, but at least I have found a way to be amused by them.

Recent “Dan Brown wannabe” book where the writer apparently felt even less desire to get anything right about any of his premises than Brown typically does went Brown even further by finding… unique ways to misuse plain English ( for example, misused “infallible” when groping for “unflappable”), have an “expert pilot” grab the “steering column”. . . on a helicopter whose propellers were making enough noise to keep the writer from thinking, “Maybe I ought to do my homework on helicopters before making a fool of myself in print.”

Hilarious.

Another? How about a fun-filled romp through a zombie apocalypse book filled with things like super-competent, manly-man hero filling up a late-model vehicle with gas and then “topping it off” after the pump clicks off. “Manly-men” know that can harm the vehicle’s evap system, cause the vehicle to run poorly, and even lead to hard starting or failure to start. In today’s world, it’s an easy fix (though sometimes complicated) to repair an evap system. . . IF one can narrow down the part or parts damaged by topping off, and costs can range from $10-$200, depending on several factors. In a zombie apocalypse scenario, having to repair the evap system on one’s go-to vehicle is sub-optimal.

But that’s OK, cos the book was chock full of this kind of stupid stuff, so reading it as a farce (OK, OK, skimming it, cos it wasn’t really worth reading *heh*) was. . . OK.

The problem with all these hilariously stupid books–not bad or “suckitudinous” books, just stupidly executed–is that the errors of logic, fact, grammar, punctuation, and usage they embody are just reinforced in whatever uncritical readers glom onto them. *sigh* There were once literate editorial staffs at tradpub houses to correct some of these problems, but even there, the quality of literacy in tradpub editorial staffs has waned.

Oh, well. At least I can laugh at and mock such things, and such amusement is worth something as the world generally goes to hell in a handbasket.

Posted on

At Least THIS Illiterate Practice Is Still Deprecated

The occurrence of “try and [verb]” as against the correct “try to [verb]” in print in general is still minimal. Unfortunately, the #gagamaggot misuse of “and” still seems to be very common in (typically) very poorly edited self-pub text and in social media, etc., all over the increasingly “mass man”-dominated1 Internet.

Social democracy sometimes sucks.

Do note that I have no objection to the use of “try and” when it is genuinely appropriate and adds meaning. For example,

“Two Judges Try and Fail to Shut Down Union Strike” in a headline is OK, though in a sentence in the body of a text it would be better-written as, “Two judges try–and fail–to shut down union strike,” or, slightly less clear, “Two judges try, and fail, to shut down union strike.”

Or,

“It’s better to try, and regret, than not to try, and regret.”

In neither of the cases above would “try to” convey the meaning intended, but cases like this are rare compared to misuses of “try and” where “try to” is appropriate. Sadly, the colloquial misuse of “try and” contributes to a poorer language rather than enhancing English.

1See Ortega.

Posted on

Down with Dysgraphia!

*sigh*

I have become convinced that, despite enabling many fine writers to become successful authors, self-publishing/”Indie publishing” has had an overall negative effect on the quality of text available. The sheer number of aspiring writers afflicting readers with their dysgraphia is appalling. *sigh* Oh, well, at least writing reviews on Amazon encouraging such dysgraphics to just PLEASE JUST STOP IT offer some slight ability to ameliorate the problem. Slight.

For MUCH less than the tip of the iceberg upon which contemporary lazy, subliterate, self-made dysgraphics sink their “great works,” start with:

Commonly misused words and phrases

Of course, a simple search for such things will turn up many, many more such lists, but that’s a start. And,of course, such lists don’t even scratch the surface of grammar that would gag a maggot, stupid misuses of tenses (quite apart from more ordinary grammar errors; for example, an understanding of past perfect and past conditional tenses seem to be dead, dead, dead *sigh*), and on and on and. . .

Posted on

Matters of Principle or just Irrational Overconfidence?

I have ceased being shocked at the *cough* “deep thinkers” *cough* who share their “thoughts” in various print and eprint media whose “deep thoughts” are too deep to allow mundane things like spell checkers, and whose “literacy” extends only to what they have heard (and dependably misunderstood) others say.

It’s as though being stuck on a wad of gum at the far lefthand side of the Dunning-Kruger Curve is a matter of idiotic pride for them. Yeh, it’s a principle. #gagamaggot

Continue reading “Matters of Principle or just Irrational Overconfidence?”