by Wilbur Witt
Ok boys and girls this is pet peeve Monday, and I have a pet peeve that just gripes my ass! Illiteracy, moreover, ignorance, and more than that, simple comprehension, that when absent displays rampant stupidity! If you got past those introductory lines you are one of the special few, and I put them in there to weed out the people who will never understand this article. Shall we continue?
Now, I don't mean to brag, but I'm a pretty literate guy. I've made some change writing songs which means that I am versed in making my point in about sixteen lines and they have to have meter, and they have to rhyme. If you transfer that ability to prose you can quickly see that I can communicate with my readers on a level that is clear, entertaining, and articulate. When I write an article such as this I will read, and re-read it many times, checking for such things as punctuation, spelling, the basic idea, and, oh yes, the dreaded auto-complete that stalks us all in this modern era. I sent a text to a young lady last week where I THOUGHT I'd said, "You need to spread your wings and fly," and what she got was, "You need to spread your legs and cry!" GoodBYE girlfriend!
We are all aware of the shortcuts in texting such as LOL, or TTYL, but that's not what I'm talking about here. What irritates me is people who cannot read with comprehension, causing me to have to restate the simplest ideas over and over again. Example of this (and this JUST happened) is I text a girl telling her, "He is in a state of big time denial and reality is going to wake him up." Now that's pretty straight up, or at least I thought it was. I'm making a simple observation about a man who is not accepting facts as they truly are, and, as with us all, the reality of the situation will come upon him. I get a response back, and folks, I'm going to quote here, "Big Time What?" I had to text her back three times explaining what the word "denial" meant! This lady has words reserved on her iPhone so that she doesn't have to type much. One of the words is "crazy," and that's her usual response to everything. I say, "They arrested so and so," "Crazy." We may go to war in Syria," "Crazy." "It looks like rain today," "CRAZY!" So, you can clearly see when you send a three syllable word, such as "denial" to such a person, right away you run into problems . . .crazy!
We have degenerated down the food chain from, "I would like a Big Mac, order of fries and a Coke," to "Ug, Grog need food!" it goes further than that. I told this certain person that men get paid so much for doing a particular job, and she comes back with, "Who gets paid!" OMFG! She is so dim witted it defies logic, and I'm going to be up front with you, I rarely use any composition rules beyond what I learned in Miss Hornbuckle's eighth grade English class. And she's not the only one. In simple speech I will have to do the same thing. I will patiently explain over and over again until I lose it, turn on my best Rush Limbaugh voice and say, "I'm going to the store to buy BEER."
I think there should be a test you have to take to join any social media service. You need to prove you can understand simple commands. My DOG can do that. Come, go, don't piss on the floor, things like that. You should be aware of your surroundings, the world, and state of affairs. A little knowledge of history would be nice. Simple questions like, "Who is Hillary Clinton, and who is she married to?" Or, "If you have five rocks, and you smoke one, how many do you have left?" Another, "What was the race of Malcolm X?" We won't even touch the Gettysburg Address because it's more than 64 letters long and contains multi-syllable words and it would be unfair to put that much on them at one time.
Maybe there will be a resurgence of literacy, and understanding, but I'm afraid until then it'll all just be. . . "Crazy!"
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