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Which makes it all the more impressive that it's quoting Tacitus and such like. There's an important distinction between reading level and intelligence, and I t
by bonaldi 5y ago
Which makes it all the more impressive that it's quoting Tacitus and such like. There's an important distinction between reading level and intelligence, and I think we conflate the two in modern writing. Simple language doesn't need to be simplistic.
- memling 5y ago> Which makes it all the more impressive that it's quoting Tacitus and such like. There's a common trope about "8th-grade" education in the US, and a fairly common response to it, e.g., https://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/K-12/p_test/1895_Eightgr_test.htm https://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/K-12/p_test/1895_Eightgr_test.h.... There are, of course, reasons for the differences that aren't merely reactionary "people are dumb now" or "technology FTW!!1!" I suspect some of the quoting of Tacitus is due to a more classical emphasis, even in early education (see, for example, the McGuffey Readers[1]), where Latin and Greek were more widely studied, and their authors more integrated into the grade-level curriculum. I didn't read Herodotus or Tacitus until college (a classics course) and was pleasantly surprised by how readable and accessible they were. [1] https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/14640 https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/14640 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McGuffey_Readers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McGuffey_Readers