"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
Answer: It’s the guy with the bad golf swing who’s also poorly photoshopped to back up the laughable claim that he goes skeet shooting “all the time”.
Note: the photoshopped pic purporting to be of The Zero with his saddle oxfords, golf gloves and a shotgun turned up in a Tweet from New Republic with a link to a fake White House site. TNR, of course, is just anther limb of the Democrat Octopoid Hivemind. Since it was caught out, it’s tried to blame its stupidity on Twitter.
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?
Started a book–a novel. As usual, I read the acknowledgements. It’s a quirk of mine. The guy started off thanking “. . .the most influential English teacher in my life,” who “also happens to be my mother.” So far, so good. When he gets to his father, though, he demonstrates that the most influential English teacher in his life either wasn’t influential enough or was just not a very good teacher with,
“Growing up you thrilled and terrified my friends and I with bedtime stories. . . “
As any literate person knows, “my friends and” in that sentence doesn’t negate proper English usage. Absent, “my friends and” the sentence reads,
“Growing up you thrilled and terrified I with bedtime stories. . . “
Sounds like the statement of a subliterate doofus, right? Well, “my friends and” doesn’t change that.
That’s one strike. I’ll give him two more and a plot or character failure before the book is ashcanned. That’s fair, isn’t it?
And someone, please, report his mother for being an incompetent English teacher, mmmK?
Really. A *cough* classic “WTF*xtaposition”:
“Follow Masterpiece Classic on Twitter”
Really. Ya just can’t make this Shiite up. And they say it with what sounds like a straight face!
*heh*
See other posts on my reading addiction. It’s been out of control for more than 50 years. Recently, I’ve been able to put some books down before finishing them with a hearty, “&@## no! Not worth my time!”
I’ve just recently (OK, 5 minutes ago) created another, “Nope. Not wasting my time” category under fiction reads. Picked up a real goat-gagger (something I usually enjoy: lots and lots and lots of pages of small text on very thin, high-quality–at least for this day and age–paper). It promised fair to hold my attention for a good evening’s read. . . until I got to the four pages of background timeline covering a couple hundred years of back story and another four pages of dramatis personae.
Oh, &@## no! It’s supposed to be a story! If I NEED a set of references to keep the story straight, the guy obviously can’t just tell the story and get out of the way. I’ve done that sort of thing–read books where authors just canNOT just tell the story and paint the worldscape/background into the narrative skillfully, and it’s just a PITA. If an author can’t just do his job well enough to do paint the worldscape/background into the narrative skillfully, I’m not going to waste my time on his work. He’s banned from my reading list. Period.
Moving on. . .
. . . because civilization would truly collapse. Why do I say this? Because not only are young adults–you know, the ones who would have to carry the torch, as it were–largely illiterate (or at least massively subliterate and/or a-literate), but most of them don’t even know how to hold a writing implement like a pen or pencil.
Seriously. Watch a 20-something try to write anything with pen and paper. Almost every one I see nowadays has the most awkward, cramp-inducing grip imaginable. This, of course, results in nearly unreadable penmanship in many cases and is sure to induce the dreaded “writer’s cramp” in short order. Without the ability to comprehend the millions of volumes of written “dead tree” text (no matter how laboriously they may be able to decode those funny lil squiggles on the page) and thumb-text in “pseudo-L33T” on their ubiquitous dumb phones, the transmission of information is bound to die.
In short order, what was once civilization will be back to the Dark Ages where people don’t even know what used to be possible. Though it’d still be an order of magnitude more advanced than the typical Muslim society today, it’d be back to life as “nasty, brutish and short” in a generation.