Tag Archives: literacy

On Censoring Dictionaries

Posted on by
Comment

Why?

This morning, one of my Twitter friends @mjvalente linked to an article on John Gruber’s Daring Fireball blog, “Ninjawords: iPhone Dictionary, Censored by Apple.”

As a writer, I’m bothered by most forms of censorship, so I read what Gruber had to say. He described Ninjawords, an iPhone dictionary application, and had all kinds of glowing praise for it, followed by the meat of the problem:

It’s a terrific app — pretty much exactly what I’ve always wanted in an iPhone dictionary, and, yes, with both a better user experience and better dictionary content than the other low-cost dictionaries in the App Store.

But Ninjawords for iPhone suffers one humiliating flaw: it omits all the words deemed “objectionable” by Apple’s App Store reviewers, despite the fact that Ninjawords carries a 17+ rating.

Apple censored an English dictionary.

Gruber goes on to point out just how idiotic this is and, frankly, I can’t disagree with anything he has to say. Dictionaries should include all words in common usage; the words that were removed — words like shit and fuck — can be heard daily on cable television and in schoolyards.

My question is this: By removing them, are they trying to pretend that these words don’t exist?

Whatever.

This morning, I used the Dictionary widget, that’s part of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard on my Mac. I use this tool often throughout my work day to make sure the words I’m using in my work are the right words or to look up words I’ve heard but am unclear on meaning. With Gruber’s post fresh in my mind, I decided to see what would happen if I looked up shit.

Shit in the Dictionary WidgetGuess what? As you can see in this screen shot, it was there.

So was fuck.

So Apple makes a dictionary with “objectionable content” available as part of its operating system, which can be used by anyone — including school children! — but will not allow an iPhone (and iPod Touch?) app with the same content?

You might argue that the Dictionary widget and application in Mac OS X are protected by Parental Controls. But how many kids who are unfamiliar with these words are likely to be buying dictionary apps? And with these words in common usage throughout the U.S., how many kids do you think have never heard them? And isn’t there some educational value to understanding the true meaning of a word and its usage? I don’t know about you, but I find the Dictionary Widget information shown here quite illuminating. I especially enjoy the “unobjectionable” explanations of the phrases.

This all goes back to George Carlin’s routine “The Seven Words.” The whole routine — not just the words. (If you follow that link and watch the clip on YouTube, watch the whole thing, including his reasoning. George Carlin was a genius.) They’re just words, people. They’re not going to bite you or make you immoral or cause you to want to kill someone. They’re individual words — not even used in sentences to communicate a message. Just plain words.

Sorry, but it just doesn’t make sense to cut them out of the dictionary.

And removing other words with perfectly acceptable meanings — words that even appear in the Bible! — just because they also have “objectionable” meanings only makes matters worse. A cock is a bird. An ass is a donkey. (Gruber’s post lists more of them.) Should kids be kept in the dark about these meanings, too?

Apple, you know I love you — I’ve been using Macs and writing about them since 1989 — but you’re being silly. Cut it out. You’re embarrassing us.

Literacy Might Be a Good First Step

Posted on by
Comment

I’ve received messages and comments that were barely literate, but this one takes the cake.

I just received the following e-mail message from someone who had likely read one or more of my posts about flying helicopters or the helicopter job market:

Bare in mind that I have never flown a acraft of any type before…… I want to get into flying a turbine helicopter (of my owne) and I live in Mississippi. Everything I find online about schools is very, for lack of a better term eather full of crap and or confusing as all hell. and there are more schools than you can shake a stick at, but all have a list of requierments a mile long just to take a class. I ask you because you are already a pilot, and might atlaest be able to give me a guide line and rough idea with out all the bullcrap to confuse it. I need to know what I have to do to get a helicopter pilot licence, both for comercial and privet flying. where I can go to do so. and a high ball estimit of what it will cost me. could you please help me on this matter?

I did not edit the above. This is exactly how I received it, copied and pasted into my blog editing software.

Those of you who don’t see a problem with the above…I have one question: what the hell are you doing here? My writing must seem like Greek to you, since I tend to write at a Grade 8 level or higher.

While I don’t know anything about the age and background of the author of the above (other than the tell-tale Mississippi comment), I like to think that he’s in at least eighth grade. (And, for the record, although I live in Arizona, I didn’t go to school here.)

I had to read it three times to understand what he was getting at. I can see why he finds online information “confusing as hell” — his understanding of properly spelled words in the English language is likely minimal.

This is the kind of e-mail I get sometimes.

You know, I want to help people achieve their dreams. I really do. That’s one of the reasons I blog about the things I do. I can do these things, so it follows that other people can, too.

But I can’t tell people how to perform miracles.

This guy is doomed before he starts. I know that if I were hiring and someone sent me an e-mail or cover letter or (heaven forbid) resume with as many errors as the above message, I wouldn’t even bother to answer it. This guy’s failure to put together a single error-free sentence makes me wonder how he’ll fare when it’s time to study the POH (that’s Pilot Operating Handbook) for the turbine helicopter he wants to fly.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: you cannot get anywhere in life without basic communication skills — including writing skills. These days, with spelling and grammar checkers built into half the writing software out there, there’s no reason to send out a communication like the one above.

You want a career as a pilot — or anything else? Learn how to communicate first.

And, for the record, it is not my intention to ridicule the author of the above. If I wanted to, I would have included his name and e-mail. (Even I’m not mean enough to do that.) I’m just using his communication as an example. I’m hoping that my e-mailed response to him — that it’ll cost $40K to $80K to get the ratings he needs to fly helicopters for a living — scares him into more reasonable aspirations.

Like getting his GED.

On Illiteracy and the CelebCult

Posted on by
4

Thoughts about the demise of intelligence and critical thinking.

Today, two thought-provoking articles that I read online came together in my brain. Here’s the meat of the matter.

Can You Read Me Now?

About three weeks ago, one of my Twitter friends, @BlankBaby, tweeted a link to an article on truthdig by Chris Hedges titled “America the Illiterate.” The article begins with a few statements I can’t help but agree with:

We live in two Americas. One America, now the minority, functions in a print-based, literate world. It can cope with complexity and has the intellectual tools to separate illusion from truth. The other America, which constitutes the majority, exists in a non-reality-based belief system. This America, dependent on skillfully manipulated images for information, has severed itself from the literate, print-based culture. It cannot differentiate between lies and truth. It is informed by simplistic, childish narratives and clichés. It is thrown into confusion by ambiguity, nuance and self-reflection. This divide, more than race, class or gender, more than rural or urban, believer or nonbeliever, red state or blue state, has split the country into radically distinct, unbridgeable and antagonistic entities.

At no time did this become more evident than during our recent presidential campaign. Consider these points:

Existing in a non-reality-based belief system? Unable to distinguish between lies and truth? Informed by simplistic, childish narratives and clichés? Yeah. I think so.

Mr. Hedges’ article goes into some detail about the problem of illiteracy in America. He has statistics — although I’m not sure where they’re from — that claim 42 million American adults, including 20% with high school diplomas, cannot read and 50 million read at an elementary school level. He claims — and, as a writer, I find this hard to believe — that “…42 percent of college graduates never read a book after they finish school. Eighty percent of the families in the United States last year did not buy a book.”

There’s a lot more and it makes for fascinating reading. I agree with much of the opinion content, which is unfortunate because it paints such a bleak picture of Americans. But the following quote stuck with me when I read the piece and I actually clipped it out to write about it later:

In an age of images and entertainment, in an age of instant emotional gratification, we do not seek or want honesty. We ask to be indulged and entertained by clichés, stereotypes and mythic narratives that tell us we can be whomever we want to be, that we live in the greatest country on Earth, that we are endowed with superior moral and physical qualities and that our glorious future is preordained, either because of our attributes as Americans or because we are blessed by God or both.

I’m reminded of thought-free flag-wavers who cry treason whenever someone uses their Constitutional right of free speech to question American policies at home and overseas. I’m reminded of Sarah Palin, claiming that these flag-wavers are the “real Americans” while the rest of us, in that other America — the people who know how to think critically — are unpatriotic.

A Canary Speaks Out

This morning, I followed up on another link sent out into the ether by a Twitter friend that turned out to be related — at least in my mind. @BWJones linked to an article by noted film critic Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times blog called “Death to Film Critics! Hail to the CelebCult!” In it, Mr. Ebert claims that “a newspaper film critic is like a canary in a coal mine.” His piece was prompted by a 500-word limit imposed by the Associated Press (AP) for all articles by entertainment writers.

Worse, the AP wants its writers on the entertainment beat to focus more on the kind of brief celebrity items its clients apparently hunger for. The AP, long considered obligatory to the task of running a North American newspaper, has been hit with some cancellations lately, and no doubt has been informed what its customers want: Affairs, divorces, addiction, disease, success, failure, death watches, tirades, arrests, hissy fits, scandals, who has been “seen with” somebody, who has been “spotted with” somebody, and “top ten” lists of the above. (Celebs “seen with” desire to be seen, celebs “spotted with” do not desire to be seen.)

He goes on to say:

The CelebCult virus is eating our culture alive, and newspapers voluntarily expose themselves to it. It teaches shabby values to young people, festers unwholesome curiosity, violates privacy, and is indifferent to meaningful achievement.

That’s the root of the matter right there. People are more interested in celebrity lives than just about anything else. They’d rather read about what a “hot” celebrity ate for lunch yesterday than the failing economy, war in Iraq or Afghanistan, energy problems and solutions, or the struggles of third-world nations against poverty, disease, and genocide.

Of course, they’d rather see video or pictures of what the celebrity ate for lunch. No reading required.

It’s a failure of critical thinking. Too many people living in a non-reality-based world. And the media is feeding it. Newspapers and television channels are selling out, providing this low-level content just to survive.

Mr. Ebert points out, “As the CelebCult triumphs, major newspapers have been firing experienced film critics. They want to devote less of their space to considered prose, and more to ignorant gawking.” He goes on to say:

Why do we need critics? A good friend of mine in a very big city was once told by his editor that the critic should “reflect the taste of the readers.” My friend said, “Does that mean the food critic should love McDonald’s?” The editor: “Absolutely.” I don’t believe readers buy a newspaper to read variations on the Ed McMahon line, “You are correct, sir!” A newspaper film critic should encourage critical thinking, introduce new developments, consider the local scene, look beyond the weekend fanboy specials, be a weatherman on social trends, bring in a larger context, teach, inform, amuse, inspire, be heartened, be outraged.

But his conclusion is what ties his piece in with the truthdig article I started this post with — at least for me:

The celebrity culture is infantilizing us. We are being trained not to think. It is not about the disappearance of film critics. We are the canaries. It is about the death of an intelligent and curious, readership, interested in significant things and able to think critically. It is about the failure of our educational system. It is not about dumbing-down. It is about snuffing out.

Think about it…if you can.

The Rise of Idiot America

Posted on by
4

Why the Internet might save us all.

Two days ago, I took a considerable amount of time out of my day to read an article in Esquire by Charles P. Pierce, “Greetings from Idiot America.” The article, which was published in October 2005, was long, well researched, and well written. It used lots of multi-syllable words, which I’ve grown unaccustomed to reading. It shamed me, in fact, that I had to slow down and read certain passages more than once to get the full meaning.

When I finished reading, I felt a mixture of emotions: sadness, outrage, relief. I was sad because, for the past three or four years, I’ve been thinking hard about the topics Mr. Pierce covers in his article and I agree with most of what he says. It isn’t good news. I felt outraged because what he outlines and exposes is a planned attack against knowledge and science by those seeking money or power (or both).

This paragraph sums it all up for me:

The rise of Idiot America is essentially a war on expertise. It’s not so much antimodernism or the distrust of intellectual elites that Richard Hofstadter deftly teased out of the national DNA forty years ago. Both of those things are part of it. However, the rise of Idiot America today represents — for profit mainly, but also, and more cynically, for political advantage and in the pursuit of power — the breakdown of a consensus that the pursuit of knowledge is a good. It also represents the ascendancy of the notion that the people whom we should trust the least are the people who best know what they’re talking about. In the new media age, everybody is a historian, or a preacher, or a scientist, or a sage. And if everyone is an expert, then nobody is, and the worst thing you can be in a society where everybody is an expert is, well, an actual expert.

But I also felt relief — relief that there were people out there who were thinking and could see what was happening, and could put those thoughts and observations into words in a place where others could find and read them. People like Mr. Pierce. Words like this article. Places like highly respected magazines and the Internet.

What It’s All About

“Greetings from Idiot America” starts with a discussion of the Creation Museum and the scene on the day when its “charter members” each paid $149 to see exhibits that included dinosaurs wearing saddles. These people came from as far away as Canada. They came with their home-schooled children as a “field trip.” They came to view exhibits that would legitimize their belief that the Bible’s book of Genesis is an absolute fact.

I’ve never been the the Creation Museum and never plan to go. I don’t want to support it with my money — money I’ve earned through logical thinking and sharing my knowledge by writing books and articles. But John Scalzi visited it not long ago. And his written discussion and photo tour are highly recommended reading and viewing. While Mr. Pierce writes about the museum before it was completed two years ago, Mr. Scalzi brings us up to date with a complete picture of the finished product. Dinosaurs with Adam and Eve are only part of the situation.

Mr. Pierce goes on to discuss various events in recent political history that support his theory. He ticks off point after point. A thinking person can’t help but be amazed that things like this have happened in our country, in our government, in the 21st century. It becomes clear why school systems can be conned into believing that Intelligent Design might just be another valid theory — even though evolution has mountains of real evidence to back it up. Or why America has slipped from being a leader in science — when we’re more interested in Britney’s custody battles or the latest American Idol.

In his article, Mr. Pierce reminds us:

Americans of a certain age grew up with science the way an earlier generation grew up with baseball and even earlier ones grew up with politics and religion. America cured diseases. It put men on the moon. It thought its way ahead in the cold war and stayed there.

I’m in that age group. I watched Neil Armstrong step out onto the surface of the moon. I was eight years old and I didn’t fully understand the significance of what was going on. I recall watching a scene that included the leg and ladder of the lunar module sitting on the surface of the moon. The picture was black and white and not very good. We waited a long time for something to happen. There was static with the voices, along with a lot of weird, high-pitched beeping. It was boring. It was late. I wanted to go to sleep. But my mother made me and my sister sit up and watch it. It was history in the making. It was proof that America was a country of great thinkers and doers. In less than ten years, we’d accomplished the goal the late President Kennedy had set for us.

Sadly, our current president won’t set any goals for us at all.

Mr. Pierce interviewed Professor Kip Hodges at MIT:

“My earliest memory,” Hodges recalls, “is watching John Glenn go up. It was a time that, if you were involved in science or engineering — particularly science, at that time — people greatly respected you if you said you were going into those fields. And nowadays, it’s like there’s no value placed by society on a lot of the observations that are made by people in science.

“It’s more than a general dumbing down of America — the lack of self-motivated thinking: clear, creative thinking. It’s like you’re happy for other people to think for you. If you should be worried about, say, global warming, well, somebody in Washington will tell me whether or not I should be worried about global warming. So it’s like this abdication of intellectual responsibility — that America now is getting to the point that more and more people would just love to let somebody else think for them.”

Pierce goes on to say:

The rest of the world looks on in cockeyed wonder. The America of Franklin and Edison, of Fulton and Ford, of the Manhattan project and the Apollo program, the America of which Einstein wanted to be a part, seems to be enveloping itself in a curious fog behind which it’s tying itself in knots over evolution, for pity’s sake, and over the relative humanity of blastocysts versus the victims of Parkinson’s disease.

I see the truth and tragedy in this. Do you?

On Flying Spaghetti Monsters

I should probably mention here that I’ve also begun following the blog, Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster (CotFSM). According to Wikipedia:

The Flying Spaghetti Monster (also known as the Spaghedeity) is the deity of a parody religion called The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster and its system of beliefs, “Pastafarianism”. The religion was founded in 2005 by Oregon State University physics graduate Bobby Henderson to protest the decision by the Kansas State Board of Education to require the teaching of intelligent design as an alternative to biological evolution.

In an open letter sent to the education board, Henderson professes belief in a supernatural creator called the Flying Spaghetti Monster which resembles spaghetti and meatballs. He furthermore calls for the “Pastafarian” theory of creation to be taught in science classrooms.

One of the features of the CotFSM blog is the reprinting of “love mail” and “hate mail” received by Mr. Henderson. I read a bunch of posts the other day.

The love mail is an interesting mix from atheists (which you’d expect) and religious people who “get it.” All agree that neither Intelligent Design nor Creationism should be taught in schools. In fact, they all agree that religion should not be part of a public school education at all.

The hate mail is amazing. I really can’t describe it any other way. The majority of it consists of angry tirades penned by religious fundamentalists. Some of them seem to realize that the CotFSM is a joke or parody while others apparently believe that the CotFSM has real believers — in other words, they just don’t “get it.” Either way, they’re united in their belief that supporters of the CotFSM will go to hell. (Not surprising, I guess. What else is there for “sinners”?)

But what bothers me about some of the hate mail is the complete lack of literacy. Here’s a recent example:

wow you people are crazy i pray to my LORD jesus christ that you people wake up God created man in his own image and im sorry but if you look like noodles with meatballs growin out your BUTT you need to go back to SPACE or get back in the pan where you’ll be somebodys dinner!

people will believe anything!!

i am verryyy happy i was well homeschooled becuase i would be in jail for punching a teacher in the face when she tried to tell me about this so called spagetti monsterr!

i hate to be the breaker of bad news but when you look around when u die u wont be with your master meatball you’ll be burning in the pits of HELL and i am a REAL christian and that hurts to know that so many people are gonna be in hell! over a random guy that started a joke and has nothing better to do besides make up some god for fun then see how many people are loving this idea.
God bless you wacked out meatball loving freaks!
-christy

Wow, this person is illiterate. I guess grammar, punctuation, capitalization, and spelling are optional in the home where she was schooled.

And this is what worries me about the future of our country. As more and more people pull their kids from school in favor of home schooling or pressure their school systems to teach non-science “theories,” the average intelligence of our population drops. Christy (assuming she spelled her own name right; I’m making an educated guess on the capitalization) might be an extreme example of the problem, but she’s out there. How many others like her are building and populating Idiot America?

Read it and Weep

If you’re concerned about America and what’s been happening to it for the past decade or so, you owe it to yourself to read “Greetings from Idiot America.”

But don’t stop there. Get your thinking friends to read it. Discuss it. Blog about it. Get these issues out into the open.

It took me more than two years to stumble upon this article. Why? Could it be that I’ve been sucked into Idiot America, too?

But thanks to the Internet, it was still out there, waiting for me — and you — to find it.

Some Thoughts on Religion

Posted on by
13

And a few books to back up those thoughts.

In trying [desperately] to catch up with the RSS feeds I follow, I stumbled across a three-part series of excerpts from Christopher HItchens’ new book, God is not Great.

Lately, religion has been on my mind more than ever before. Our country is being led by elected and appointed officials that repeatedly claim that their faith in God is what guides their decisions. And we’ve been sucked into a war where religion is the motive or justification for extremists to kill themselves and others.

I’ve never been a religious person. I’ve always believed that doing the right thing whenever possible is far more important than praying or going to church or skipping meat on Fridays during Lent. I’ve always been satisfied to let others believe what they want — as long as they don’t try to make me believe.

But things are different these days. Religion is causing deaths. Deaths of innocent people. Deaths of patriotic young men and women who go to Iraq with the misguided belief that they are protecting America. And it hurts me — a thinking person — to see so many lives lost or ruined every day in the name of religion. In the name of God.

Am I the only person seeing it this way?

Religious Literacy

Religious LiteracyI’m currently reading Religious Literacy by Stephen Prothero. The book is really two books in one. The first part of the book explains how important religion has been throughout the history of the United States. With the country’s Protestant background, religion was taught not only at home, but in public schools. As time passed and immigrants arrived with other religions, less religion was taught in school. Supreme court rulings that stopped school prayer pretty much put an end to religion in school. As a result, Americans have what Prothero refers to as a religious illiteracy.

It’s interesting to note here that Prothero makes a very good distinction between teaching religion and teaching about religion in school. While he apparently agrees that school should not be used to preach religious theories or convert students to any one set of beliefs, he believes that a curriculum that covers the basics of all major religions would be beneficial. He believes that only through knowledge of what these religions involve — beliefs, rituals, histories — can an educated person discuss and make informed decisions about what’s going on in today’s world. I couldn’t agree more — which is why I bought the book. The President may not understand (or care about) the difference between Sunni and Shi’a Muslims, but I do.

The second part of the book is a glossary of the world’s religions. Important terms are clearly defined, giving the reader a good base of knowledge. I think of it as World Religions 101. And although Prothero is quick to say that the information in Chapter 6 of his book is not all inclusive, I believe it’s a very good start for anyone interested in learning about the beliefs and histories of other faiths.

In any case, I highly recommend the book. Although the first part is a bit dry and repetitive, the second part is sure to fill a lot of holes in your knowledge of world religions. Best of all, Protheros makes no judgments at all, so his book will appeal to believers and non-believers alike.

What I Believe

As I mentioned earlier in this entry — forgive me; I still have a terrible cold and am having trouble thinking linearly with a headache and hacking cough — for the past year or so, I’ve been thinking a lot about religion. And I’ve recently concluded that I’m probably an athiest.

I say probably, because I’ve always been agnostic, even as a youngster. The conscious conclusion that I’m a non-believer was not easy to make. But looking back on the decision-making process now, I can’t understand why. It makes more sense to me that there isn’t a God than that there might be.

Before I go any further, please spare me the irate comments about my beliefs. If you think all atheists will rot in hell, fine. You don’t need to clutter up the comments for this post or send me nasty feedback to warn me. For obvious reasons, I don’t believe that. And if you feel that you can no longer read my books or follow my blog because of my religious beliefs (or non-beliefs), you can keep that to yourself, too. People who feel that way are just an example of what’s wrong with religion in this country (or world). Too many closed minds, too much intolerance.

And, of course, I won’t try to convince believers that they shouldn’t believe. I have a lot of respect for people who can have faith in God or religion — both of which were invented by man. If going to church on Sunday or praying facing Mecca five times a day makes you feel good, great!

But if your religious beliefs are causing you to do evil things — discriminate in employment or housing, deface or vandalize private property, or harm innocent people — it’s time to take a real look at what your God really means to you.

God is Not Great

The God DelusionI’ve been waiting for a chance to read The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins for some time now. (It’s on my Amazon.com Wish List.) I’ve listened to Interviews with Dawkins on the Penn Jillette Radio Show (Penn is an atheist) and on the NPR show, Fresh Air. Although he comes off as a snobbish elitist — it might be the accent — I do agree with much of what he has to say. Listening to his views is part of what brought me to my decision about my own beliefs. It was the first time I’d heard anyone present the atheistic view in an intelligent, educated, and persuasive way.

God is Not GreatToday, I stumbled across excerpts from Christopher Hitchens’ God Is Not Great on Slate.com. One paragraph in the first excerpt really brought things home to me:

While some religious apology is magnificent in its limited way — one might cite Pascal — and some of it is dreary and absurd — here one cannot avoid naming C. S. Lewis — both styles have something in common, namely the appalling load of strain that they have to bear. How much effort it takes to affirm the incredible! The Aztecs had to tear open a human chest cavity every day just to make sure that the sun would rise. Monotheists are supposed to pester their deity more times than that, perhaps, lest he be deaf. How much vanity must be concealed — not too effectively at that — in order to pretend that one is the personal object of a divine plan? How much self-respect must be sacrificed in order that one may squirm continually in an awareness of one’s own sin? How many needless assumptions must be made, and how much contortion is required, to receive every new insight of science and manipulate it so as to “fit” with the revealed words of ancient man-made deities? How many saints and miracles and councils and conclaves are required in order first to be able to establish a dogma and then — after infinite pain and loss and absurdity and cruelty — to be forced to rescind one of those dogmas? God did not create man in his own image. Evidently, it was the other way about, which is the painless explanation for the profusion of gods and religions, and the fratricide both between and among faiths, that we see all about us and that has so retarded the development of civilization.

This is how an intelligent person looks at religion — all religion — from the outside. And — fortunately or unfortunately — this is how I look at religion these days, too.

Needless to say, this book is now on my Wish List.

Why Tell You?

I don’t know what I’m hoping to achieve by presenting my thoughts about religion here, in this blog. I think it’s just my way of getting things straight in my own mind.

Please remember that this blog began back in 2003 as a personal journal — my way of recording the things that go on in my life and mind. I think this entry is in tune with that purpose. Years from now, I’ll look back on these words and remember what I was reading and thinking in these sad, confused times.

But maybe — just maybe — my thoughts might help a few readers clear their minds on these issues.