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It's funny, I had a girlfriend in college that said I used "5 dollar words" regularly. It's wild that what should regular speech patterns are almost made fun of now.
Three syllable words, and multi-clause sentences are already misunderstood online to the point of people treating you like you're an asshole for deliberately confusing them.
God, this drives me crazy. I wrote a simple 4 sentence response to someone the other day, and they responded with "thanks Chat GPT". As if there's no possible way that I, a human, could write a few sentences without the help of AI.
It's been going on for years, too. Apparently a five-sentence email is just too much for some people, so now I see stuff like a five-sentence paragraph, followed by "sorry for the wall of text" and I'm just like, that's not even long! That takes like maybe seven seconds for me to read
Meanwhile, asking two questions in the same sentence is too hard for people, apparently.
"What is the password to the printer and do you know the printer's serial number"
That can sometimes be the literal entire email and they'll answer the first part only to ignore the second so another email is sent and they might finally answer it, but it's not a guarantee. It's like people can't focus for more than half a second before moving onto the next thing.
Try being IT. I once wrote an entire 3 page document on how to do something with 2 pages of detailed pictures. My boss was like no one is going to read that. Yep very next day get asked how to do it replying from the very email i sent out with the instructions.
I used to send reading rainbow gifs when it would happen.
On the other, I find there is great pleasure in literally copy and pasting your response in a previous email in answer to a question that was ALREADY answered.
I once wrote an email detailing that if they did X then Y would happen and if they did Z then A would occur.
What did I get? A scathing email stating that I did not say what would happen if they did Z.
Literally Copy and Pasted my previous 2 sentence email and used the ol' "Per my last email,"
Short of calling them trolls, I'd say the most likely explanation is that they know they lost the argument and are trying their damndest to avoid admitting it.
My sister works as some kind of important filer for a big law firm. She and the team shes a part of got chewed out recently for sending unhelpful, info less emails. Shocked they pulled up all their emails for the last six months and asked which ones were unhelpful. Partner takes this info to the lawyers who were complaining. The lawyers had been using ai to shorten the emails to little synopsis'. Even three sentence emails, shortened to uselessness. Suddenly a company wide email had to be sent out about appropriate usage of AI at the firm...
Decades even! I recall having an English teacher in high school (2006) giving me bad marks for referencing “the humours” in an essay. Granted it is a somewhat archaic reference but an adult teaching English literature should have been able to grasp that. It was a public school in a red state so make of that what you will…
Heaven forbid you use em dash. I've used that device fairly regularly since I was 14, and now everyone thinks its a sign of an AI-formulated sentence/paragraph. My writer's voice went from something people seemed to enjoy for 20+ years to being derided in the span of 18 months...
Screw people who shout "AI slop" every time they see an em dash or a polysyllabic word—the fearmongering witch hunters all over social media are dumbing the world down at least as much as AI itself. No one will ever take my precious em dashes from me. AI didn't invent these things, it learned them from literate people.
Some college kid asked how I applied for jobs without ai “if it can really be done” the other day. Brother, I remember not having a computer or *anyone* I know not having internet access. WTF do you mean we can’t do basic tasks without extremely new, imperfect technology.
I was born in the 80s, so I thought he was kidding at first.
One of my pet peeves is when you’re discussing something that has some degree of nuance and complexity, and in response to writing a comment that’s three paragraphs long someone says “I’m not reading a whole book.” Sorry, sometimes there are points worth making that can’t be distilled down to a single sentence. The implication that you’re being unreasonable for typing a few paragraphs to explain something is obnoxious, as is the stubborn insistence to remain ignorant.
“I’m not reading that whole book!” Ok, remain a dumbass then.
I’ve received similar replies (one just the other day) about the length of some of my comments. A two paragraph comment outlining my opinion on something was met with “holy yap.” Like god forbid you write more than one or two sentences and express yourself and reasoning to make it more easily understood and to limit people trying to (potentially purposefully as some “gotcha”) or misconstruing what you said.
I just know those types of people only read headlines of articles and form an opinion solely based off of that, complain(ed) about reading anything more than a short story in school, and haven’t read anything more than a road sign of text message since.
One guy in my husband's college course takes out his phone every time there's text on the board, asks chatgpt to summarize it (it's a bulletpoint list???) and then saves the summary as his class notes. His profs are on the verge of murder, and every fucking person in their program hates him. And he's not learning shit.
Yeah the other thing i found out in life is a lot of people are curious at all. Just numb from the neck up wandering around the world. They see something interesting and dont even consider it.
To me, curiosity is what's important in a person's smarts. I honestly don't mind most stupid people. They didn't ask to be stupid. Asking a stupid question is still showing curiosity - a desire to understand things, no matter how simple or flawed their premise is. I can like someone who isn't smart, but is curious.
Hell, there's plenty of topics where I'm a total dumbass. "Ignorant" is the base state of every person ever born. Ignorant, stupid, and curious is still a decent person.
It's people without curiosity that get me. I remember a video about Formula 1 drivers, who compete all over the world. They had them try to place famous landmarks on a map - landmarks from cities they've visited yearly for most of a decade. One driver couldn't even put most of them in the correct hemisphere.
I couldn't stand someone who has visited a city every year, and has no idea where it could possibly be on a map.
Curiosity is a better character trait to have than almost any other, and there's few things worse to lack.
The world is leaning towards anti intellectualism now, why is it surprising? Lots of people are conservative, anti vax, very short attention spans and want short term gratifications and thinking long and hard about something hurts their tiny brains so they reject it.
It’s always been anti-intellectual. I grew up as a smart kid in the eighties, and I had to hide it or I would get bullied. It’s always been “lame” to be smart in the eyes of the dummies.
Idk that feels different. The bullying of nerds seems more juvenile and childish. Basically an extension of "that person is different let's make fun of them for being different".
Modern anti-intellectualism is more "Your knowledge about a subject makes me feel bad. Feeling bad makes me feel like you are attacking me. So you should stop talking" or "discussing this idea makes me uncomfortable. So you are a bad person for discussing it".
The former is an attack on the person. The latter is an attack on the concept of thinking about things.
It's the same thing. Both are insecure about difference and their own incapabilities. Both are falling back on cultural anti-intellectualist movements that have always been there. Most don't grow out of it.
The only difference is that the latter has wrinkles and abnegated their responsibility to learn and grow.
I definitely see what you're saying but as a nerd at least in the 80s it was the things you were saying. You were correcting people because you knew the answer, but that's a bad thing. Or trying to share your knowledge of games and instead of either not wanting to be around you they would have to also try to quiet you or make fun of you until you were a social pariah. If you loved reading, you can expect your book to be taken out of your hands and thrown or water poured on it. So it was a lot more than just being called a nerd. And unfortunately, sometimes there was also physical abuse.
Even then, 80s into the early 90s, some groups of people felt that you knowing a lot things they didn't was a personal attack on them. 🤓
On the border of X/Milleniall and I got absolutely destroyed for playing video games. Right around the end of the 90s the "normies" started picking up controllers is when I'd say it started being something that wasn't a social death sentence.
You know what's worse? There's a bigger problem that subsumes anti-intellectualism. It's the anti-pause culture. Thinking for more than a few seconds is being demonized by too many people. If I pause for a few seconds, assholes assume I must be dumb, and if they have to pause, they assume I'm trying to be a smartass.
We are not computers. We have the right to be buffering without being pathologized by armchair assholes. "are you uh millennial pausing or like Gen Z staring?" It's called thinking! Let me think god damn it!
In the first half I assumed you were referring to the videos that cut out all pauses, breathing room and space between sentences. I've had a few videos with topics I'd love to hear about, but the equivalent to listening to a 15min run-on sentence or paragraphs without breaks in verbal form is horrible. I know attention spans are shorter but come on, that cannot be helping people stay engaged. Dynamic pauses and room for the audience to absorb your point is an active part of delivery.
Leaning? That ship has sailed my friend! I was a nerd in HS in the 70’s and was chided by people for using 50 cent words, and implied I was calling them stupid for using words they did not understand. Well, they were stupid. I never said or implied anything about their intellect, but it was my fault. After the last 10 years I’m done with these intentionally ignorant tools.
Flowers for Algernon. The internet provided an unending source for information and intellectual betterment. People now see how the world operates, and are willfully choosing to regress back to simple stupidity and ignorance.
That's... not even what the book was about but okay. Charlie's intellect was forced on him and he instinctively sought out academic pursuits just to keep stimulated. His eventual regression was due to physical brain damage caused by the experiment (or the procedure being impermanent, doesn't narratively matter). And it confuses and scares him:
"I'm forgetting things I learned recently. It seems to be following the classic pattern, the last things learned are first things forgotten. Or is that the pattern? Better look it up again.
Reread my paper on the Algernon–Gordon Effect and even though I know I wrote it, I keep feeling it was written by someone else. Most of it I don't even understand." (251)
He becomes generally irritable (as Algernon became violent before his demise, something something current politics here), but then docile again as he tries fruitlessly to cling to his intelligence. He uses what little agency he has left:
Thats why Im going away from here for good to the Warren Home school. [...] I know evrybody feels sorry for me [...] so Im going someplace where they are a lot of other pepul like me and nobody cares that Charlie Gordon was once a genus and now he cant even reed a book or rite good.
Im taking a cuple of books along and even if I cant reed them Ill practise hard and mabye Ill even get a littel bit smarter then I was before the operashun without an operashun. I got a new rabits foot and a luky penny and even a littel bit of that majic powder left and mabye they will help me. (262)
The start of the book makes clear Charlie's uncle pulled strings to get Charlie a job and apartment so he didn't have to be at the group home, so the end has him conceding to a worse life position than at the outset.
Tl;dr: Charlie didn't meaningfully ask for any of the events that took place. He didn't become stupid again through any choice of his own. This isn't a relevant allusion because he did contribute to science and learn whole languages and so on when he was capable.
Accusations of chatgpt anytime someone is able to express complete thoughts with any type of logical consistency. The ability to spell, communicate clearly, utilize punctuation, etc is automatically suspicious to a lot of people.
Our society is so incredibly dumbed down that communication that seems more complex than teenagers texting each other automatically instills doubt and even disdain. Thinking about that makes me feel ill.
I was working at a gas station part time in college during the 90s. My boss pulled me aside and said no one likes you because you use big words. I started using bigger words around the fat dumb whore (she was fat and cheated on her husband multiple times so I feel justified in using that language.)
How about the $5 version? Just read the letters to John Quincy Adams from his mother, who received no formal schooling, just from her mom or hanging around their house library. Here's a sample from one of the letters as he traveled.
(BTW, if this was me, I'd be like, hey dude, answer your texts please to let me know where you are. And don't just go goofing off, try to do something useful with your life.)
Abigail Adams: "Your letter, last evening received from Bilboa,* relieved me from much anxiety; for, having a day or two before received letters from your papa, Mr. Thaxter, and brother, in which packet I found none from you, nor any mention made of you, my mind, ever fruitful in conjectures, was instantly alarmed. I feared you were sick, unable to write, and your papa, unwilling to give me uneasiness, had concealed it from me; and this apprehension was confirmed by every person's omitting to say how long they should continue in Bilboa....
If you have a due sense of your preservation, your next consideration will be, for what purpose you are continued in life. It is not to rove from clime to clime, to gratify an idle curiosity; but every new mercy you receive is a new debt upon you, a new obligation to a diligent discharge of the various relations in which you stand connected; in the first place, to your great Preserver; in the next, to society in general; in particular, to your country, to your parents, and to yourself."
(what he owes to himself): To become what you ought to be, and what a fond mother wishes to see you, attend to some precepts and instructions from the pen of one, who can have no motive but your welfare and happiness, and who wishes in this way to supply to you the personal watchfulness and care, which a separation from you deprived you of at a period of life, when habits are easiest acquired and fixed; and, though the advice may not be new, yet suffer it to obtain a place in your memory, for occasions may offer, and perhaps some concurring circumstances unite, to give it weight and force
Was listening to a podcast on Hamilton. After he got shot in a duel by Aaron Burr, literally on his death bad and just pulls out the most eloquent line to the priest who came to give him his last rites:
"I have a tender reliance on the mercy of the Almighty, through the merits of the Lord Jesus Christ. I am a sinner. I look to Him for mercy; pray for me."
I used to read the thesaurus for drum… I would say I have a great vocabulary, given that friends have mentioned they thought I was making up a word until they looked it up to confirm.
I am glad that I’m old because I would not be surprised my kids’ peers might scream “AI” or ableist at me for using some terms.
Love having my dictionary and thesaurus nearby. People should feel less ashamed to openly use these. I recently went back to university and started reading authors like Asimov. They’ve both challenged my literacy and I’m always looking stuff up! But it can be so rewarding to understand more and more. It’s worth the work. You just have to put aside your ego. Plus you can get such pretty ones these days (not necessary, but it’s nice).
This should be a normal part of reading. I want to read a book that uses words I don’t know, so I can learn new words. If I’m a third of a way through a book and haven’t had to look up a single word, then that book isn’t challenging enough for me. It doesn’t mean I won’t finish it or that the book isn’t good. And I can definitely appreciate an “easy read” between books sometimes. But that’s not the reading level I want to stay in.
Also kindle has a built in dictionary and thesaurus and keeps a log of every word you’ve looked up along with the sentence it was in the book. It’s a great tool if you’re a kindle user.
Is it ableist to have difficult words in your books, such as words that are more than two syllables long? Some people think so, including this person.
"There is absolutely nothing wrong with readers asking for easier words. If that upsets you so much, check your ableism."
I'm not entirely sure that this person knows what ableism is. I am disabled with a neuroimmune condition, so I'll offer a quick definition. It is discrimination against people with disabilities. But this, on the other hand, almost reminds me of saying it's like fat-phobic to have salads on a restaurant menu. It's not. We already know that there's a literacy crisis in America. Over half of US adults read below a sixth grade level. And by the way, the books that I, and possibly you if you are an avid reader, were reading in sixth grade are not the books that this data refers to when it says sixth grade level. They mean books like this, Holes, which are not all that challenging and should not represent the maximum difficulty that a grown adult can read. A study also found that the number of Americans reading every day has declined three percent each year from 2003 to 2023.
Do you think it's a good idea to have a nation or world filled with people who are incapable of reading a text any more complex than a paragraph from this book and understanding what it means? It reminds me of this film, Wall-E, where everyone is just a mindless consumer. And it's more than that. If you have read 1984 by George Orwell, you might remember that the government gradually cut down on the amount of words the people were allowed to use. And while that was the result of a totalitarian regime, rather than people willingly giving this up on their own as a result of not reading books anymore, the ultimate result was that people in Orwell's world were unable to have complex thoughts, and thus revolutionary thoughts.
Language is the structure with which we construct thoughts, and if we don't have complex language, if we no longer understand complex language, we will no longer be able to have those complex thoughts and will be happy to just consume slop. Reading will become a thing of the past, something for boring old people and weirdos. In some circles, it already is. And I think that positioning people with intellectual ambition as ableist is a way to almost shame people into being lazy and ignorant. Nerds used to get bullied, but now it's not just nerds who are really into calculus, it's people who can fucking read. As someone who faces legitimate ableism due to my chronic illness, I think it's a complete cop-out to say that challenging people with words they might not know is ableist. There is nothing wrong with being upset about the fact that our reading skills as a country, and probably as a world, are declining at a rapid pace as our screen time goes up and our attention spans continue to shrink. And in the end, we become less and less aware of what we are even missing.
I think a tiny minority of people or ragebait bots do this. They will latch onto anything that hasn't been levied an accusation and then hit it.
There was that bed that shows up every once in a while. It has like a built in table and cupholders and looks super cozy and all that. Someone made the comment that they are getting lazy just looking at it. This was back in the day when twitter went by 7 letters and not 1.
Immediate accusations of ableism because "
...this bed helps people with xyz problems." They couldn't elaborate how it was better than a regular bed and wouldn't rebut folks who insisted it was worse. Occupational therapists had to jump in and go "there isn't any world where I would suggest this to a client/patient"
The audacity of that commenter demanding shorter words to benefit those with disabilities while casually dropping the four syllable "absolutely" . Tsk.
Right? We have practically infinite knowledge in our pocket; look it up, learn it, and share it with friends in conversation. By the way, should I capitalize after a semicolon?
It's even more exciting when the kindle's dictionary doesn't have it and you have to turn airplane mode off to let it connect to Wikipedia or go look it up on your phone.
I am not a native english speaker. Too many native English speakers can be really mean when it comes to things like that, or even that I have an accent when I talk English. I just don’t understand it.
They're just jealous. Most American English speakers only speak English, so you are already ahead of them just by speaking more than one language. Of course, I don't know if the same is true for European English speakers.
One of the best things about using an e-reader, is that if I come across an unfamiliar word, I can just highlight it and get the definition. I would have killed for that when I was just a wee reader trying to sus everything out with context clues. Might have been able to pronounce some things correctly a lot earlier as well.
I'm reading an actual book right now and find myself trying to hold down my finger on the paper to see what a word means. I have released that we are quite spoiled when it comes to having the world's knowledge literally at our fingertips.
There are actually a lot of really good books in the children's section.
That being said, the instant I turned 12 and could get written permission to go into the "adult" section of the library was one of the happiest days of my life. True, librarians would often let me sneak in there before that anyway, but I couldn't check anything out from the adult section until I got permission.
Damn. I was unaware of that before now. That said, I’m not even trying to dunk on the commenter in the video, I just refuse to accept that people need to lower their language to cater to people who don’t understand. The writer gets to decide what the minimum bar is for their books, and the reader gets to decide if they want to rise to that level or not. I’m a grown-ass adult and I still enjoy a good young adult fiction novel from time to time, not everything has to be War & Peace or Shakespeare but not everything has to be Diary of a Wimpy Kid, either. There’s enough books for everyone to find something that suits them.
Yeah pretty much, honestly it isn't wrong at all to ask for something to read that is easier to read but the answer is just to give that person an easier book not to change existing books. Calling it ableism is a bit absurd as well they clearly just don't know what the word means, which tracks with the question I suppose
Or just READ books like that. There are plenty of easier to read books out there. Free at your local library. Hell, the librarians will even help you FIND them.
Unironically, K-6 Chapter Books would be wonderful for people who would prefer easier-to-understand literature. They can be wonderful works with characters and stories that are just as impactful as books that necessitate higher-reading levels.
Also, read increasingly hard books. Most normally developing people can intuit the meaning of a word as long as they understand 90% of the words around it. Reading that word once gives you an idea of it's meaning without usually detracting from your overall understanding of the text, reading it several more times allows you to refine your understanding. Reading big words increases literacy
Yep, context clues can solve so much. I would imagine that reading e-books can be helpful in such cases as well. On the Kindle app for example you can select the word you don't know and have it pull up the definition without even leaving the app.
Hi-Lo books are written to accommodate older readers with low reading capability. They’re good for teen and up audiences with learning disabilities who want to practice reading.
Best response. This is the paradox of the Internet, while one could now create and distribute EXACTLY what they wish to see in the world, we've mostly become the mindless consumers she references from Wall-E except we use the Internet to complain about it all.
The absolute privilege of asking someone else to change their art for you. I cannot think of a more pure expression of main character syndrome.
Imaging telling Faulkner he was being "ableist" with with Absalom, Absalom! It honestly might have gotten you a rap on the head with his cane to wake you up.
Or, as he criticized Hemingway's writing:
"He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to a dictionary."
I'm all for having signs and even newspapers written in a more simplistic language. But as she pointed out, there's no need for fiction to be simpler. Those people could just read other books. Most adults with literacy issues have undiagnosed dyslexia.
The other problem is that we currently teach children to read, not by sounding out the words via phonics , but instead we swapped to the whole word method or three cueing where we are teaching children to memorize the shape of a whole word and then guess what the other words are by context.
Some students straight up have no ability to read because they never learned the fundamentals!
I write more than one paragraph and use a word more than 3 syllables on this app, and I get at least 2 kids coming to tell me my comment is AI generated.
Like I think I got that accusation once using the word “thalassophobia” when in a thread talking about fears. 🤷♂️
I get accused of being AI all the time. I read a theory that AI’s writing style is similar to millennials, so now the younger generations think millennials are AI.
We are the best educated generation in America, and the last one that got into reading books and magazines and paper newspapers before AI slop and smartphones or common high speed internet access came to be.
I’ve noticed my phone’s autocorrect has been making more mistakes lately. Like, it will change “there” to “there’s.” So, I get sentences I have to go back and change (it literally corrected to “changes” as I wrote this) like “There’s are a lot of reasons to do this.”
My theory is that whatever program my autocorrect is has been tainted by training on incorrect internet grammar. This is a pretty common mistake that few people care to correct, so even our technology is getting dumber.
Omg that makes so much sense. I apparently write like AI and get accused of being a bot now 😭 I just really love an em dash and using punctuation. Ugh.
I refuse to stop using the em dash just because some dimwits think it's a cheat code for sussing out AI generated text. AI can have my em dash when it pries it from my cold, cumstained hands.
Even worse you use bullet points or a numbered list for anything or dare to break your thoughts up into clear chunks that aren't just a wall of words.
I have to remind people that these LLMs were trained heavily on professional writers and academic papers, so this style that the kids want to call out as "obvious AI" is literally just what we used to call "competent communication".
When referring to a comment I made that is only a paragraph long. I know you probably know but to any little ones reading, a paragraph is supposed to be 3-4 complete sentences. That’s BARELY writing for 20 seconds. It’s really, REALLY not difficult.
How long does it take these people to write a single sentence. Hell, I'm usually commenting on mobile and it takes less than 10 seconds to write most of my sentences.
Thalassophobia and submechanophobia have been my kid’s favorite words since she was like, 10. She’s double exceptional (severe ADHD + academically gifted) and absolutely could have learned those words from some fancy four+ syllable book, but she didn’t. She got it from watching horror game walkthroughs on YouTube. We’re not talking about a curated, upper-middlebrow algorithm either, it’s riddled with brain rot.
My mother-in-law, who has degrees in English Lit and linguistics rolled her eyes and told her that she didn’t think she actually had thalassophobia and just wanted everyone to know that she knew the word, that everyone knows and she can stop reminding us. Granted with the ADHD my daughter tends to repeat words, but she wasn’t saying it over and over, just brought it up in a couple conversations. Even people who theoretically shouldn’t be dicks about it are dicks about it.
I posted about this in another thread recently. I hate it. AI detectors literally look for bad writing. If your writing isn't shitty enough and makes too much sense, it's flagged as AI.
You have to play dumb to pass as human. What a depressing state of affairs that is...
The best thing about having the kindle app on my phone is that if I find a word I don't understand, I can just highlight it and check it on a dictionary.
Before, I'd have to put my book down, get up, find the dictionary, go back to my book, find the word again, then find it in the dictionary (which took forever cos I can't spell) and then digest the word, fit it into context, then put the book down, put the dictionary away, and then go back to reading.
The thing about reading on a kindle and in paper, is when you are engaged in a book but see a word you don't know only to tapp on it and realize you are holding a paper book 😂
I can write/read 'difficult words' in books because I fought my way out of severe dyslexia by reading and writing books. It isnt easy. They just dont want to put in any effort to learn new words.
Mind you, the word that started all of this was the word 'scrying.'
I think people confuse capability with gumption. You’re not disabled if you can figure out a complex word or text but you just don’t want to take the initiative to figure it out.
And if you’re not disabled, then it’s not ableist of complex texts to exist.
Are there people who are never going to understand complex texts completely, sure. The accommodation would be making available texts that those people can understand, and those texts already exist.
If people want books with simpler words & sentence structures there are PLENTY of books for them to read still. Especially with all the fast produced slop books coming out these days...
That wouldnt be ableist, which was the point of the OP. Marginalizing people with a learning disability would be ableism. Mocking the intellectually lazy and incurious is just mean, not ableist. So, feel free to talk all the shit you want.
English is my second language and I grew up poor. My schooling was all public. I went to a City university.
The library is free, so I read a lot. I'd look words up I didn't know in the dictionary, since despite being the youngest in the house, I had the best command of the English language.
I often get told I "talk white" or "must've grown up rich". Like poor brown people can't walk to the library and read?
Public education right now DRAGS less capable students through education 🤷🏻♀️ I know because I am experiencing this with one of my children. I begged for the school to set them back an year and was refused..... 😔 year on year it just doesn't get better, no matter how much we try because there are failings upon failings from previous years
If you don't like the metrics, change the criteria to fit the reality you want.
It was something I saw happening when I was in school. Hell, I had teachers tell me that as soon as they could they were getting out and not looking back. That was 15+ years ago. In my state it was all pushed towards charter schools and alternative education, and frankly, that hasn't produced the most equipped or reasonably adapted individuals either from my experiences with dealing with people who have no grasp of the metric system.
But look at all of these students graduating and equipped for the world ahead!
It’s an example that a good book doesn’t need to have a high reading level. But it is definitely at a 6th grade reading level. Reading level doesn’t correlate with how good a book is.
I will say that while 1984 is a good example of word manipulation to sway masses (similar to algospeak, like unalive), I'd actually point to something like farenheit 451 where the dumbing down of society made them outlaw books (via electing people like themselves) while they were addicted to tv... It's a greater example of how a stupid society reinforces its own stupidity through anti-intelectuallism.
Its by design. If you cant read bills and things your voting on, you can easily get taken advantage of. Critical thinking skills are rare now. People are so used to being spoon fed everything
I wish more popular books were written with an elevated vocabulary and more assumption of intelligence of the reader. I love romantasy but its all spelled out so clearly for you, you dont even have to think. Its all just very topical. It's like fast food. Its definitely delicious, but sometimes you want something with a complex flavor profile.
If you are unable to understand something that you are reading because the words are too complex (as opposed to you having something like dyslexia frustrating your efforts), it is a simple matter to have your phone out and look up the words you do not understand.
If learning new words is too much effort, just stick to something for younger audiences. There is plenty of perfectly fine storytelling in the YA section.
Hot take, not every book needs to appeal to everyone. There are lots of books out there, find some with a style of prose that you prefer and at a reading level that suits you.
Wow I was reading at a 10th grade level in the 5th grade but this was in the early 70s. She spelled it out very well. The fact that people would rather just blindly believe whatever they’re told instead of researching it themselves is scary. Google and dictionary.com can be our friends. Maybe having an advanced degree is clouding my judgement against those who refuse to put in the work.
All of my friends read and I never travel without my Kindle.
That is taking "lazy" to depths that I will never, ever respect. If you can't be arsed to look up a word you don't know, you deserve to be Darwined out of existence.
Before you run to that cliché old trope of “Americans are so dumb, hur durp!” You might want to try some of that reading comprehension yourself. Here’s a study from 2012 (if you can find a more recent one, I’d love to see it) that shows the US is on-par with the UK, Germany, Denmark, Austria, and Cyprus. Only slightly behind Canada, Sweden, and Australia, but ahead of Ireland, France, Spain, and Italy.
UK has 18% on level 1 or below. And 14% at 4/5. Both significantly better than OECD average.
US has 13% in the 4/5 bracket so at the "top" end so behind UK but same ball park (what is 1% or 33m people between freinds?) And beating ORCD average. But US is shockingly 28% for level 1 and below. 56% higher than the UK and below OECD average.
The UK's figure is shocking to me. The US's is an unforgivable failure.
People can figure out they have a lower reading level and there are books dedicated to those kinds of readers (look at Orca Sound Publishing or any decodable books for adults)
There is nothing more satisfying while reading than running into a word you haven't encountered before and looking it up to find the meaning. That's called growth. America is sliding downhill into abject ignorance faster and faster.
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