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*