The New Literates

Like previous decades, we are faced in this decade with different words and phrases -- so-called "catch phrases."

There was the hip talk of 'heavy, man, heavy' in the 60's, the 'gag me with a spoon' (preferably silver) Valley Girl rhetoric of the 70's.

The 80's gave us both "amped" and "awesome,” both too trite to even bother with the definitions. Perhaps the most obnoxious of the 80's yuppie terms was “significant other” – as if the subject was a wall hanging.

The 90’s found the following competing for our rhetorical attention:

• Copreneurs: Couples who go into business together.
• Skillfully Unhelpful: In a service oriented society, people who are pleasant, cheerful and accommodating, but who don't get the job done.
• Serial Monogamy: Being committed to one person at a time through a series of relationships.
• Cleansing: Getting rid of bad habits through fasting, abstaining, denying or combinations thereof.
• Sequencing: Living your life in stages; career, family, etc.

And in the first decades of the 21st century we have more of the same, as in:

• Tipping point: the end-all-to-be-all fulcrum of measurement, and which now has very little to do with its original usage in construction – and, believe it or not, is now defined as: “the moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point; the point when everyday things reach epidemic proportions.”

Whew – almost makes you want to reach for a cool, damp cloth.

As well, since when did “reveal” become a noun – as in every makeover show fawning over the about to be displayed “big reveal !”

Likewise, the person who came up with “chillaxing” to marry chill and relax, should have ice cubes placed in strategic orifices.

Anyway -- these are some, and there will of course be many more such examples of generational cuteness gone retching.

But there is a larger issue, and one more than merely irritating everyone within earshot – and it’s one that can be called the “New Literates.”

In fact, the term literacy has been redefined. It goes beyond grammatical correctness to the various ways -- reading, writing and speaking -- in which we communicate with one another. We've become educated beyond our intelligence and, in the age of the new literates, are rapidly becoming functionally illiterate.

Part of the reason for this can be traced back to the year 1957 when the USSR launched Sputnik and the United States hurled itself into a frenzy of education. That frenzy has evolved into communication based largely on quantification and objective analysis.

This has redefined literacy as we are now living through an age where we not only have to deal with the specialized language of the legal profession, but also the analytical shorthand of the economist and the magnificent mush of the bureaucrat.

And as these institutions and professions carve out slices of the power pie, most have begun to depend almost exclusively upon specialized languages -- which permit them to communicate among themselves -- but which also means the average citizen must rely on professional or institutional interpretation of the information being conveyed.

No longer are communication skills used simply to convey thoughts, ideas, dreams, or to get a drink of water. Communication skills are now used to gain and maintain power.

For example, the Pennsylvania Department of Education issued a report several years ago that called chapters in that report, "shapes." Welcome the new literates.

As more and more persons in a democratic society become aware of and choose to exercise the access to power, those already in power will find the easiest way to maintain power is to confuse pretenders to the throne by using specialized languages.

Language that is purely objective all too often removes a problem from its context. At the very least, the language of the expert/professional separates the ordinary person from a ready involvement with the issues, an involvement critical to the exercise of freedom in a republican democracy.

As it used to be practiced, literacy is declining. No more apparent is this than when reading the job application of more than a few high school graduates.

However, vastly improved basic communication skills are possible, if not everyone is pushed into the professions, and if reading, writing and rhetoric are considered important enough to emphasize at an early age and carried throughout formal education and in the home.

To do anything less is to hamstring a free society even more so than the new literates presently bind it.

And now let’s – uh – bottom-line this – uh-- slam-dunk presentation.

As we talk more and more in text tested and media flavored (and thus favored) phrases, the box outside of which we claim we want to think gets larger and larger and, hey man – can you dig it?