this post was submitted on 31 May 2024
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21% of US adults are illiterate in English, mostly coming from rural areas and predominantly Spanish-speaking areas (Spanish speakers account for only around 1/3 of those illiterate in English on average). My state (Georgia) has an adult English illiteracy rate of 23.6% :)
And yes, I have known PLENTY of people who write like this (or worse than this), I have too much first-hand experience to immediately doubt this
On the other hand, it shows how a primary language having very inconsistent&non-phonetic spelling completely fucks up the literacy average... in a language like Spanish, Polish, or Finnish, being poorly literate makes very little sense, at least in the sense of "correctly associating written words with spoken words"; for the most part it's a binary can or can't, if you know the basics then you can write everything you say and say everything you read with few exceptions (and even with these exceptions, it ends up being close enough to easily recognize still). You know your writing system is fucked up when spelling contests exist for it.
Agreed.
One of my biggest English pet-peeves. The other is "living language" revisionists who argue that language should be allowed to evolve, thereby validating any faddish slang that's used; and so-called "dictionaries" like those hacks at Merriam-Webster who'll add anything to their English dictionary as long as one of their editors heard the word used in the radio once.
OED is the only English dictionary of any repute.