From 3/4/2003

Thoughts are flitting all thru my mind tonight. I heard on the radio that one of the leading causes of child safety seats being improperly installed in automobiles is because the instructions are too difficult to read. They said that the instructions were expressed for people who could read at a 10th grade reading level. What bothers me mostly isn’t anything to do with child safety seats, but rather the sobering statistic that roughly half of the population in the United States only can read to the 5th grade level!

I’m a very strong believer that language is a central component of human sentience, that language is enriched by a vast and capable vocabulary steeped in a language that allows for expression beyond base communication like grunts and peeps. I believe that a rich vocabulary can only spring from three places, reading books, being taught, or engaged with “vocabulary enriched” cohorts and learning from their discussion and wits. I suppose at the root of it I see a rich vocabulary and the ability to use it well as a cornerstone of human thought, that when vocabulary is stunted your ability to express thoughts to others is severely curtailed and that the point of communication and language is not to merely enjoy thoughts in your own head, but to share them with others. I’ve been declared a bit of a lingusitical elitist because I consider the contents and richness of a persons vocabulary to be a direct measure of the complexity of their thoughts, that people with rich, capable speech and understanding are the self-same people with the ability to think beyond food, shelter, and reproduction. When I heard that half of Americans cannot understand written work beyond the 5th grade level I felt alternatively a wave of disgust and a pang of pity, because to me, these people will never be able to forge anything more complicated than “See Spot Run”. The pity comes from all that wasted creativity that obviously exists within each human mind if they only had a toolbox that wasn’t manufactured by Tonka.