Talk:illiteracy

The cites for (2) are from b.g.c search for "an illiteracy of". Most hits reflect this sense. Older sources (say, pre-1950) appear disproportionatly, but recent ones do, as well.

The cites for (3) are from b.g.c search for "is an illiteracy". Many hits are for "is an illiteracy crisis/initiative/...". All of the in sense (3) are from dictionaries or style guides. There was one from the Merriam-Webster guide to English usage, but I couldn't get the full text. I can't help pointing out that of the three examples given, only "could of" suggests that the speaker is going by sound and not writing. The other two are just dialectal variants — but we all know that someone who doesn't talk like us can't read. Sigh.

There is another sense attested, roughly "ignorance", as in "an illiteracy of mathematics". A true die-hard prescriptivist would say that this must mean "an inability to read mathematics", of course. I haven't dug up the cites. I might add a definition and example to get the ball rolling -dmh 17:22, 19 January 2007 (UTC)

The 1913 Webster definition for the sense (3) here is: "An instance of ignorance; a literary blunder." This looks like a more accurate definition than Wiktionary's. Combining one of the quotes and the definition from the article here results in the non sequitur "The phrase could of is a word, phrase, or grammatical turn thought to be characteristic of an illiterate person, since of is not a verb." Using the Webster definition makes much more sense in this case: "The phrase could of is an instance of ignorance, a literary blunder, since of is not a verb." Also, as the illiteracy rates in English-speaking countries today are very low, do people really have any idea what's characteristic of illiterates' English? -- Coffee2theorems 22:19, 26 May 2007 (UTC)