Re: describing the minority as literate is a circular argument?
Someone with well-developed language skills is probably aware that they have good language skills. In the same way, someone with poor language skills is, no doubt, aware that language is not their strong point.
But "well-developed" and "poor" are relative terms. They tend to be used with reference to the standards of the educated elite. However, by the standards of some subcultures, members of the educated elite might use the language poorly, in the sense that their audience might not understand what they are saying.
I would suggest then that the more literate person is much more likely to be put off by poor spelling (in the sense of having a poor opinion of the product quality) than the less literate person would be distracted by a correct, if slightly unfamiliar, spelling.
I think it's also a matter of being a high-brow as opposed to an illiterate.
High-brows are people who know what the standards are because they've been told what they are. They know that a book is good because it's a classic or written by an influential writer, and what the correct spelling is because of what they'e been taught. They'll reject a non-standard spelling as "wrong" simply because it is different, just as they'll find no value in a category of fiction such as science fiction that isn't accepted as part of the literary canon.
By contrast, an intellectual has learned how to judge things by their own merits. Intellectuals know a book is good because they can probe what a book attempts to do and evaluate how well it succeeds. Just because a book is a classic does not mean that an intellectual will admire it. Similarly, when faced with an unusual spelling, instead of rejecting it simply because it is different, the intellectual tries to understand why it is used. If the use is non-standard but effective, the intellectual may accept it in some context, just an intellectual may find literary merit in a mystery or a graphic novel in a way that a high-brow never could.
In other words, it comes down to evaluating everything according to rules or according to their own terms.
both the high-brow and the intellectual are products of our educaton system, and members of the educated elite. Need I mention that our education system produces twenty high brows (at least) to every one intellectual, or which one I think is more worthy of trying to be?
--
Bruce Byfield
http://members.axion.net/~bbyfield
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References:
describing the minority as literate is a circular argument?: From: diotima
Re: describing the minority as literate is a circular argument?: From: Bruce Byfield
Re: describing the minority as literate is a circular argument?: From: Lee Hunter
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