Wow. I'm actually ANGRY that someone on LJ is illiterate!

[xiphias]

Okay. Illiteracy isn't the same as "can't spell." I can't spell. When I remember, I use the spellcheck function before posting, which doesn't happen as often as it should, so it's embarrassing. Illiteracy isn't the same as "poor grammar". My grammar's pretty good, mostly, but I mess up sometimes, and, anyway, poor grammar doesn't bother me.

No, illiteracy is "can't communicate."

I'm reading infojunkies, and someone posts a case of a judge ordering a woman (who, truly, shouldn't have kids) to not have any more kids. I comment on it.

And then infuriating levels of illiteracy set in. I mean, c'mon -- I'm wrong a lot of the time when I write stuff. But I like to think that I write clearly enough that y'all can SEE where I'm wrong, eh? I mostly write using comprehensible language, chains of logic that, while they may sometimes be flawed, are at least VISIBLE, points of argument which may be wrong, but which are at least THERE.

I'm not convinced that some of the stuff I'm reading is even English. I had to ask Lis to look over one of the responses, because it LOOKED like language, but I couldn't make it out. I've been having migraines, so I had her check. Just in case I'd had a stroke which had wiped out part of my ability to parse written language.

Because, really, that's what it felt like.

Comments

[king-tirian.livejournal.com]

I didn't think it looked all that bad. Sort of that whole Usenet-y style of combative rhetoric that most of us wouldn't do if our co-discussor were in the room with us.

To attack your basic question (as I, too, am a Rochestarian), Judge O'Connor is not a kook, just someone who has to face this problem of people using the safety net like a trampoline in an atmosphere of shrinking federal, state, and county support for foster care. I get the impression that she was just tired of suffering in silence on what she felt to be an important but underreported crisis. I think she understands that she is not finishing a conversation but only starting it, and that appeals courts and the legislature will do what they get paid to do.

I'm also not 100% clear that she can't enforce the ruling. We could probably track down the ruling itself instead of trusting the digested report, but one might assume that if the defendant had been found guilty of all of the various charges of being a negligent crack-whore mommy, the judge could sentence her to prison for the rest of her childbearing years and then suspend that sentence on the terms that she meet qualifications A through J.

[hangedwoman.livejournal.com]

I can tell you that this kind of ruling has been struck down before, and probably will be this time.

There is hope, though. In New York (which is where this case is) a few years back they manage to succesfully take away a woman's parental rights from the start, basically the moment the child was born. She had had several previous children removed from her custody, and had lost parental rights to most of them. The ruling held up through all appeals.

[sinboy.livejournal.com]

It'd help if you offered a link to the post you were talking about.

[yehoshua.livejournal.com]

Enjoy

[yehoshua.livejournal.com]

Reading very quickly over that exchange, I'm struck by how much of it is just wanking completely divorced from the thought process or any semblance of supporting facts. Two of your antagonists there are trying to construct high-falutin' sounding verbiage, and they just don't come off right because their arguments feel unanchored. They are also largely written in weird forms of the passive voice which makes it both feel more stilted and less intelligible.

This is similar to what I described to one friend (who is doing sexy Ph.D. work in Philosophy) as "the Other Possible Worlds Conundrum": Most problems with possible worlds (e.g. "Can we envision a possible world in which there is no word for green, but there is a word 'gricular' which means 'green or circular' and another 'grue' meaning 'green or blue' in which we can make any sensible statements at all about the color of Prof. Hirsch's necktie?") are that the questions are incredibly stupid and too abstract to deal with a real philosophical problem without causing homicidal tendencies. You end up creating impossible worlds and having to keep backing up. Eventually the only possible world is Cleveland, and that's really depressing.

But TOPWC is my formulation for describing the effect of possible worlds scenarios on the language skills of college sophomores taking Intro to Philosophy. They end up phrasing everything in the passive voice, which washes away a lot of the concreteness we rely on to keep focus in English. I think that's part of what is happening here. Your would-be social betters are so busy constructing hypothetical situations in which the woman could be jailed that they've become grammatically un-stuck.

[laurens10.livejournal.com]

The exchange as a whole wasn't too bad, but that may be largely because you defused some of the senselessness out of their responses, so they eventually explained what they meant. I guess it's your teacher skills at work?

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

That and the fact that I put all my snarkiness HERE instead of THERE.

[yehoshua.livejournal.com]

But that's no fun!

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

The sacrifices we make . . .

[mitchellf.livejournal.com]

Hmmm...where I come from (grew up in Rochester, NY), we have some rather, um, "interesting" names for that "news" paper.

There's a good reason why most Rochesterians also subscribe to either the Washington Post or the New York Times for their news.

Sure, my mom gets the D&C, but only for the Sunday coupons.:-)

As for the discussion, well, I'm in total agreement with Yehoshua. I wonder if those people even know what the phrase "attempting to sound erudite" means, since that's the only way to describe their prattle. Sorry you had to go through that. Don't worry, you're points were clear and well-stated, theirs were the convoluted ones.