But the lady can count. She can add up two bottles of wine that cost $9.83 a bottle and add tax on without a calculator. There is also no automatic change calculator on the cash register. Everything is done in her head. Honestly, I've never seen a mind work like that except for those kids on the national spelling bee.
That (you guessed it) literacy is something I will probably never be able to do. But thats how she grew up. When her dad (my father's cousin) opened the store, she was running the thing by the time she was 16. She's 60 now and that language of numbers is so imbedded in her that to make it easier with the use of computers makes her scared that things in the store will change.
Literacy, like most things, is a blessing and a curse. From music, law, numbers, chemistry, social interaction, internet lingo, World of Warcraft lingo, history, how to interact with your girlfriends/boyfriends parents, how to make cheese, how to milk a cow, how to converse with a celebrity, how to by converse shoes, how to buy shit in general, wine, and the inner workings of a city's infrastructure all have individual vocabularies, linguistics and actions associated with afore mentioned fields. For example, saying "can I milk this?" and pointing to your significant other's mom is not appropriate. However, if you were on a milk farm, different story. Saying that you have a critical hit ratio of 20% and you have all T6 gear for your level 80 orc death knight isn't exactly a conversation topic in the middle of a football game. In World of Warcraft, you would be a deity.
The difference is where and how we get this vocabulary and how we use it. It's in how we're raised and what our environment is composed of. Different strokes... you know the rest.
I am interested in the curse of literacy. I have often heard and thought the same thing but when I think more deeply about it I have a hard time identifying where the curse is. I guess the curse for your cousin is that she is so literate with quick calculations in her head that she is afraid of computers. I understand this but when I think more deeply it seems to become a circular argument.
ReplyDeleteShe is good with numbers so she never had a need for a cash register or computer. This numerical literacy precluded her from becoming computer literate. Your computer literacy has precluded you from being able to figure tax and multiple sales in your head quickly.
Reading and writing literacy ruined many people's ability to remember vast amounts of information. I do not really see any of these things as a curse. I see them as progression. If the curse of a certain type of literacy outweighs its benefit then that type of literacy will disappear over time. The disappearance is regrettable but it is not a justification to stop new literacies from happening.
Once 80th level Orc Death Knights become ubiquitous in footall (the Lions could use a few) then there will be much more discussion of them in the huddle. I doubt milking will ever be huddle conversation but other player's mothers (usually the opposition's mothers but not always) are commonly discussed in a huddle. Sports literacy would be a very interesting topic. Gaming literacy would as well.
I think that a lot of fields co-opt the term 'literacy' simply to gain legitimacy. Some computer salesman must have come up with the term computer literacy to help sell computers. When we use the term to describe something, I think we devalue it's original meaning. Literacy is an important skill to have regardless of how it's defined. By equating traditional literacy with gaming or sports or farming, I think the former becomes less credible and therefore less desirable. Many people in younger generations may believe that computer literacy is all one needs to get by in the world because of this devaluation. In fact, this will simple erode the critical skills of our society. If we want to talk of such things, we should give them a different name. Perhaps idiosyncratic linguistics would do.
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