Day 771: Eye Cn Rede Merkin

Say no to a bilingual America.  Why botch another language when we’re doing so well killing our own and can’t be bothered to read in it? 

Lately, I’ve heard  one too many people say “assessorize” when they mean “accessorize” while the misuse of “momentarily” is getting out of hand.  Add to that “supposably,” this new thing called “cross-pollinization” that’s going around at work (thanks for reminding me of that, John) and a growing number of Americans’ sheer inability to punctuate properly (a phenomenon creeping into news publications), and there you have it: We don’t deserve another language until we do well by the existing one. 

Spelling, punctuation and, often, pronunciation are hashed out and reinforced by the practice of reading.  In early-21st-century America, it appears that rapid-fire visual media, the increasing price of books and our own mechanized lethargy will induce the shunning of reading material, mass illiteracy and, ultimately, the inability to think for ourselves.  A doomsday scenario?  Look around you and at the number of times the Patriot Act passed, the War in Iraq was blessed, our rights are trifled with and think what is required to push us over the edge into true lemminghood.  We’re supposed to grow, not stagnate or regress.

Even as a representative of Project Gutenberg, a group that works very hard to keep public domain literature well within the public domain and alive in the form of electronic books, the growing disinterest in reading in general, whether eBooks or their dead-tree counterparts, is appalling.  We’re going backwards in science, backwards in infrastructure and this is the sound of another civilizational pillar cracking further.  Pay attention to the signs, for they are not encouraging. 

Endangered: The American Reader – “As sales have lagged, book prices have forged ahead.”

One In Four Read No Books Last Year – “Analysts attribute the listlessness to competition from the Internet and other media, the unsteady economy and a well-established industry with limited opportunities for expansion.”

Bookmobiles’ Final Chapter? – “There are communities where bookmobiles are the primary place to get information, in rural areas where getting to a library is difficult or a low-income area where computers are not in every home, where people cannot afford to buy books.”

While researching adult functional literacy rates in the United States, I came across this helpful page that contains all kinds of statistics on the publishing industry.  Am I to believe that “70% of Americans haven’t visited a bookstore in five (5) years?”

Again, I do not suggest that those who can read, read well and read lots can and do think for themselves; they merely have the ablity to do so and that is a start.  At the very least, they can read, perhaps comprehend and call bullshit.  Reading also shows an interest in self-improvement, things outside one’s immediate realm and respect for the written word.  It is an exercise in non-complacency – that you are willing to reach out and examine the material, instead of it served to you in pre-digested snippets on a paper or electronic platter. 

Ending on an only-kinda-hopeful note: When at a local grocery store recently, I noticed that all of the young people at the checkouts were on their cellphones except for one who quietly read a rather hefty book in between customers.  That kid’s going places and I hope to goodness she does.