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Bob Ellis - You can't spell because you're dumb

dibo

Well-Known Member
Bob Ellis at ABC's The Drum: Stoopidity spells disaster for Australia's future


It has been found that children who are bilingual have more brain connections and do better in exams.

This sounds about right. It explains why Chinese-Australian children, who not only grow up bilingual but master two forms of alphabet, always do well in the HSC, and are usually in the top two or three in New South Wales. They have more brain connections, obviously.

But it also means, must mean, that children who grow up spelling words inadequately have fewer brain connections than those who spell accurately, and therefore less intelligence.

It means, must mean, that children of the present generation and those that grew up in the 1980s and 1990s are stupider than those, like me, who grew up in the 1950s.

For if you write 'you're' for 'your' and 'it's' for 'its' and 'his' for 'he's' and 'threten' for 'threaten' and 'spoose' for 'suppose' and 'vaunrable' for 'vulnerable' and 'writting' for 'writing' and 'boarder' for 'border' and 'wonders' for 'wanders' and 'wonting' for 'wanting' - all examples from tertiary students of a teacher of my acquaintance - you don't know what you're doing. It means you have nine or ten thousand less brain connections than me (or the average Australian Chinese), and the connections between a thought and what follows can be a mystery to you, a Cloud of Unknowing, a jumble of interpenetrative meanings, like the cryptic crossword.

It can explain why more and more people are doing sillier and sillier things. Like eating Christ's flesh on a Sunday in order to get his good opinion. Like aborting babies your Scientology elder tells you 'have no souls yet', and will stop you doing valuable work for the church. Like imagining Afghans coming here on boats are al-Qaeda terrorists keen to blow us all up. Like taking heed of Alan Jones.

Brain connections between a thought and what it portends, or logically presupposes, just aren't there any more and the 'dumbing-down' of the populace is a very real thing. Using a medium available to illiterates, like radio, connections are made that make no sense. That 'people smugglers' who bring boat people to a place of liberty, opportunity and safety are evil. That bombing Muslim villages will convert their 'hearts and minds' to a love of secular democracy.

It explains too why the Americans, whose annual Spelling Bee is like an Academy Award for bright children, are better orators than we are. They are drilled through spelling by tough-minded female sergeant majors and so can form thoughts, argue and, like Obama, speak in masterful sentences that enlighten concepts and uplift the heart. They learn early how words look, and what they mean, and do not fumble through them, blindly grabbing at them, uncertain where a sentence is going. It is why in bureaucratic documents few verbs occur. The avoidance of meaning that is their watchword is a by-product, these days, not just of moral cowardice but inability to spell.

Poor spelling costs us money. Nearly every document written has to be corrected, and this wastes company time. Many job applications that are ill-spelled cost a good young person a job they might have excelled in, improving our economy. And when functional illiterates like Kerry Packer take over big corporations, a lot of ignorant bombast follows. I may not be able to read, they say, but I do know what my newspapers' opinions should be. Functional illiterates are deciding what views media entities should propound, and persuasive kooks like Glenn Beck are taking over human minds, in the millions.

What is to be done about it? Well, a Prime Minister's Spelling Bee with a $20,000 prize wouldn't hurt, nor a requirement in schools that a child memorise a page of a book and write it down while not looking at it, getting the spelling accurate, as part of his or her yearly exams.

This is very serious stuff, especially for boys. Recent research shows girls do better academically, and the gap is widening. This means Australian boys are getting more and more like South Carolinians, whose average IQ of late is 94. And more and more unable to cope with a complicated world.

If good spelling were enforced in the early grades of school, and the reading of a whole Harry Potter before the age of ten, there would be less rape, and armed robbery, and vandalism, and unemployment, and suicide, and drug abuse, and car accidents, and racism, and, oh yes, schoolyard bullying. Bryce Courtney has often said this, and I agree with him.

Because there would be more brain connections, you see, and therefore more grasp of consequences, and a better civilisation in the end, like Scotland's, or Sweden's, or Canada's, where people are drilled to spell accurately, and therefore think wittily and carefully and presciently and well.

Or perhaps you disagree.
 

Sym

Well-Known Member
so...people who type "lYk Dis" are straight up f**ked ?
always knew it.
 

dibo

Well-Known Member
I gave it a pretty simplistic topic title, but I think the article rests on an interesting premise.

The better our understanding of our language (and better yet, more than one) the better we can comprehend our world. Or in simpler terms, if you can spell bullshit you can probably smell it too.

Orwell (among others) thought that language shapes our comprehension and in 1984 he looked at the idea of 'Newspeak' - a stripped down form of language designed to limit thoughts. If you can't express an idea in words, he reasoned, you can't have the idea. He had a point.

If you shape language in a way intended to frame a discussion a particular way or use it as a tool to shape thoughts then you can influence the minds of an entire populace. If people are unable to use language effectively, they are incapable of critical thought.
 

radar

Well-Known Member
when my Iranian mate asks for the meaning of a word (that's more conceptual than dictionary-definable) I chew on my tongue until it is bloody shreds of meat in my mouth.


...and yes it's possible that some of those Afghani boat-people would like to destroy us.
 

Jazzie

Sheer joy at beating the scum :)
radar said:
when my Iranian mate asks for the meaning of a word (that's more conceptual than dictionary-definable) I chew on my tongue until it is bloody shreds of meat in my mouth.
I have a Burmese friend and colleague who has been out here for over 25 years who frequently asks me about these sorts of things, and why words such as height and weight look much the same, however are pronounced differently. Instead of going into the anglo/norman/germanic etc. influences in the English language, I just say "I dunno".

One thing that has always intrigued me is how some Northern English native speakers mingle the past and present tense, for example: he was sat in the chair, instead of he was sitting in the chair. I had an argument once with an English teacher from the North who swore black and blue that the former was correct. ..... mmm ...

Anyone hailing from the North of England care to comment?

radar said:
...and yes it's possible that some of those Afghani boat-people would like to destroy us.
lol
 

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