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Posted on 08/15/2025 11:17:34 PM PDT by kawhill
Not long ago, my son asked me about the meaning of a word in a novel he was reading for his fifth-grade book club.
“Look it up,” I responded, my automatic rejoinder when my children ask me the meaning of a word, which is often.
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As I read this, three very different thoughts came to my mind.
The first was imagining a similar conversation in a Chinese or Japanese home, where knowing words means knowing drawings (hanzi/kanji), and the difference in thinking that causes.
Second, if my child were to say that to me, my reply would be that there is only one Word that you have to know, but He, the Word who is God, knows you more than you will ever know Him.
Third, the lack of a husband in this story is so common that it isn't even mentioned or noticed, and that says more volumes than any dictionary or Siri.
Kids these days are missing so much with the availability of electronics and the internet.
Besides, what’s a kid that age doing with his own cell phone?
His brain is already being rewired in ways that are not good for it.
Scrabble.
You can’t browse Siri [or Alexa or any computer dictionary].
I learned a lot of words just cruising around looking for something else...
Kids do not seem to have that ability anymore...
‘the lack of a husband in this story is so common that it isn’t even mentioned or noticed, and that says more volumes than any dictionary or Siri.’
Many things that probably exist in these lives not mentioned
doesn’t mean they are not there. By the way, the kid was reading a novel, a work of fiction.
And how many spelling principles and words do you learn from just looking up words in the dictionary? Too many to comprehend, I’m guessing. When my son was in 5th and 6th grade, he read the encyclopedia we had just been given by my uncle.
‘the lack of a husband in this story is so common that it isn’t even mentioned or noticed, and that says more volumes than any dictionary or Siri.’
You realize, don’t you, that some perfectly lovely wives and children get left by husbands and fathers who are selfish, childish, players, etc. What would you have them do? Just grab out at anyone with whiskers so they could say there was a male influence in the house? Sometimes the emotional wreckage left behind makes it difficult to ever entertain the idea of marrying or even dating again. So all these people on their soap box about lack of fathers in the home should be looking at the fathers/husbands.
Why are people assuming there is no husband? My wife had stories like this when my kids were young. At the time I traveled about 30% of the time for business. When traveling internationally, I was sometimes gone nearly 2 weeks. It’s a reach to conclude from this there is no active father.
I always carried a pocket dictionary in college to be sure I knew the meaning of a word. I vowed I would never say in class, “was he cognitively aware?”. A buddy said later “If he was cognitive, he was aware.” Don’t want to make that mistake twice. LOL
I got a degree from a prestigious journalism school (long ago!). A couple of other students struggling with writing composition sought me for a study partner and were *amazed* that I consulted a dictionary, thesaurus, and almanac routinely when writing. They just wanted to be on television.
Historically, illiteracy is the norm. There are entire cultures even today who are, for all purposes, verbal communications only. It was mostly government that forced literacy on schoolchildren. An increasing segment of the population is reverting to a range between illiteracy and anti-literacy.
I see more and more podcasters and television talking heads whose speech gives away that they don't read and definitely don't write - and these are supposed professionals in the Communications Industry.
As the internet communications bandwidth increased, it has gotten harder to find a one-page info sheet on something, but instead I find 50 videos of varying length, quality, and questionable research by anti-literate wannabees.
The workplace is backsliding as well. With the prevalence of video meetings through mobile phones, the quality and quantity of clear, literate communications is declining.
My late brother used to have a saying that something "is more complicated than Japanese arithmetic". I suppose to the Japanese it's no more complicated than our arithmetic but not knowing the meaning of the little characters make it seems so much harder.
It's already happening with profanity where the profane words are simply dropped out, but it could also be implemented with any other speech.
The video software will give the editor the option of accepting or rejecting any recommended changes, including "accept all changes" or "accept changes automatically".
The "AI" software could also change the mouth movements of the speaker.
It can be called "Autospeak", like Auto-TuneTM for music.
Also they will remove anything that smacks of ‘white privilege’. You have to have at least one “Person of Color” depicted in your video.
I don’t think of my vocabulary as being much over average, but try this sometime:
Open a printed dictionary to any page and look at how many words you know. It’s amazing! Of course, a lot of times the same word base has many different forms and that takes up a lot of space on the page but just open the book to another page and you’re likely to know most of the words on that page as well!
When my kids asked me the meaning of a word I told them. Why be so antagonistic? Let them come to you for knowledge and interaction. You are their parent.
A little research tells you that she left an abusive husband.
“You can’t browse Siri [or Alexa or any computer dictionary.”
I cruise Powerthesaurus.com, but other online thesauruses offer the same benefit: lists of words with similar meanings. It provides a lot of “Hmmm. Never thought of that” moments for me.
As I’ve said many times in the past, the internet has made people lazy.
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