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One of the things that surprised me about social media (facebook in this case) was how people I'd known for a long time could barely string two sentences togeth

One of the things that surprised me about social media (facebook in this case) was how people I'd known for a long time could barely string two sentences together, and tended to use meme/gifs in place of what I'd consider "real" communication. I personally would not expect the past to be any different.

kogus 3y ago
I'm not sure if overall literacy rates were as high in the past (in the sense of "what percentage of people can read"), but among those who could read, the level of reading and writing skill was dramatically higher. Consider that the works of Charles Dickens were released serially, and crowds of people thronged stores to pick up the latest addition to his stories when they arrived. Those are not books that a typical modern reader would find accessible.
- jon-wood 3y ago
  A modern reader would consider them inaccessible mostly because of the archaic language and period references, which of course at the time were neither. Likewise with Shakespeare who we think of as incredibly high brow now, forcing schoolchildren to spend weeks poring over the language, but who at the time was writing the equivalent of soap operas and sitcoms in order to sell as many tickets as possible.
  - dragontamer 3y ago
    Ah yes, Shakespeare is so high brow. >> My naked weapon is out. -- IIRC Romeo and Juliet but I forget exactly where. Double entendres are all over the place.
    - bigstrat2003 3y ago
      My favorite example is the "nothing" scene between Hamlet and Ophelia, where the whole thing is a double entendre for her pussy. Shakespeare was so, so dirty and a lot of people have no idea.
      - jerf 3y ago
        I think we shouldn't teach Shakespeare in school, because there is negative value in holding up something incomprehensible to students as the Height of Culture. I can't think of a better way to turn students off to "culture". If one wanted to design a program to turn students off to culture, I can hardly think of a better one. And probably my best proof that absolutely nobody involved understands it is the complete and total obliviousness to the double entendres. If the teachers realized how dirty it was they might think twice about teaching it. If the parents realized it, there would be protests. But nobody realizes it. Nobody has a clue. Nobody understands what is being said at all. They're just all pretending because if you don't Get Shakespeare you're a stupid dum dum who is drooling your stupid all over your stupid face. But basically nobody at that level does Get Shakespeare and they are just pretending. This is not only not a good use of educational time, it's actively bad. So many students are going to be inclined to think education is a waste of time under the best of circumstances anyhow... why do we go to such efforts to prove them 100% correct? But we have to keep teaching it. Because anyone who suggests that we should stop is obviously a stupid dum dum drooling stupid all over their stupid face, and who wants to be seen with a person like that?
        swells34 3y ago
        Agreed. I think it should be taught, but taught from the HISTORICAL perspective, not from an arts/culture one. "This is an example of low brow comedy from a certain era" rather than "This is the greatest set of plays ever written". I got nothing out of Shakespeare culture wise, and mostly was just quite angry at having to read it.
        bigstrat2003 3y ago
        I think that this is throwing the baby out with the bath water. I didn't fully get Shakespeare in high school, but I certainly found it to be interesting and beautiful. Not everyone does or will, but that's true for literally everything we teach in schools.
        vkou 3y ago
        A Shakespeare play is fine for a high school curriculum. It would be a good contrast for more modern works, and it is an important cultural touchstone. But there's no good reason to cover four, or five of them. Just pick one, struggle through it, and then go analyse three or four works of modern theatre, and modern penny theatre. Half the point of schooling is trying to instill interest in a subject. Nothing instills disinterest in theatre like spending 80% of your mental energy trying to figure out what the hell the words mean. Shakespeare is meant to be seen. Shakespeare is meant to be parsable with no mental effort by the 16-th century groundlings with the rotten fruit and a strong desire to throw it. Shakespeare in grade 8-12 English is neither of those things.
  - 1123581321 3y ago
    Shakespeare is very funny and crude, but he also wielded a larger vocabulary than we're used to in our penny theatre (TV shows, popular YA books, etc.) We also know that, if nothing else, poetry is good exercising for both sides of the brain, and most people won't bother with it outside of school. (There are more reasons to teach these things but I'm setting them aside.) We don't even try to teach what was considered scholarly in 1600, let alone in Latin and French. Those works were also considered archaic back then, too.
    - supertofu 3y ago
      I remember reading an unabridged edition of Huck Finn in 7th grade that my mom had in her book collection. I was shocked at how different it read than our assigned copies. And no, I'm not talking about the racial slurs. The abridged version was in a simplified English, paragraphs and whole chapters had been edited out or reordered, whereas the unabridged version was a colorful and playful style of English such that I had never before encountered. I was a voracious reader and it still took me a month or so to get through the unabridged version of the book. I had to "translate" the witticisms and puns, but came to realize in time that Mark Twain was exceptionally clever, very funny, and not at all as racist as the volume of N-words would have it appear. (For the record, I'm Black). Nowadays, I doubt any schoolchild gets exposure to unabridged anything unless they have a parent with archaic book collections.
  - bmitc 3y ago
    I am fairly certain that that does not explain it away and that reading levels among those who are literate have indeed dropped significantly. When your primary form of entertainment and learning is long form reading, it isn't a big surprise.
    - foldr 3y ago
      In the case of Shakespeare, it doesn't make sense to look at the reading level of 16th century Londoners because they were watching his plays, not reading them.
      - bmitc 3y ago
        Well that's the problem with these game of telephone discussions. We went from the 18th century to the 19th and then all the way back to the 16th. Note that I didn't comment on Shakespeare specifically.
  - Exoristos 3y ago
    Dickens didn't write in archaic language.
- SoftTalker 3y ago
  Books were the entertainment of the day. In recent times people thronged movie theaters to see Star Wars or Harry Potter.
- pm3003 3y ago
  The public scribes of the times (who were dictated a good part of the letters in the article) are well documented, and what I read of them is coherent with these letters. The language is very informal. Since the guys were paid by word or page, they just wrote whatever was dictated. Hence the informal language. The first letter reads something like: "Your father-in-law greets you your sister greets you your brother I haven't seen since Mrs XXXX has asked news from you please pass my compliments to YYYY his wife alone gives me news from you." This was possibly a letter from someone who could hardly read anything else than a prayer book (or had eye problems) to someone who couldn't read at all. The language here is very modern, only a few outdated expressions. I've had much more trouble with professional letters from Napoleonic times, full of abbreviations and references to old social, judicial or political structures and procedures.
monadINtop 3y ago
>tended to use meme/gifs in place of what I'd consider "real" communication You don't consider humour a form of real communication? Are you sure you should be looking down on them
- dirtyhippiefree 3y ago
  2021 is considered old news, but this continues to be increasingly true…Memes Are Dead… https://www.dazeddigital.com/life-culture/article/55120/1/2021-was-the-year-the-millennial-meme-died-devil-wears-prada-actual-villain?amp=1 https://www.dazeddigital.com/life-culture/article/55120/1/20...
  - almostnormal 3y ago
    Not every picture with text is a meme. To become a meme it requires a certain level of distribution. The real ones are difficult to spot and may completely be lost among the wannabe-meme-pictures.
    - Terr_ 3y ago
      > To become a meme it requires a certain level of distribution. By that logic, there's no such thing as a rare [joke/insult/song], because all real [jokes/insults/songs] are already popular by definition. > The real ones are difficult to spot and may completely be lost Hold up, that contradicts the sentence before it: Any meme that has that "certain level of distribution" shouldn't be so "difficult to spot."
      - function_seven 3y ago
        By definition, a meme is memetic. It "self-replicates" from one person's mind to another's in an anologous way to how genes propagate. A meme that fails to attain some sort of popularity doesn't meet the criteria. Like a gene that fails to propagate itself. An evolutionary dead-end.
        3y ago
dirtyhippiefree 3y ago
For a decade news aggregators have demonstrated people don’t want to read two sentences together and we’re stuck with videos that suck massive amounts of time…sadly…
zoeysmithe 3y ago
You're reading cherry-picked letters from verbose and emotional writers, not random Joes. The poorly written ones don't make it to venues like this. Comparing this to someone's busy social media feed is a bit disingenuous. Not to mention for all you know, some of these people can write love letters like this, but why should you know that? You're not the object of their love. The same way probably no one in these people's lives knew they wrote love letters like this while they were alive. Not to mention that "love letter writing" was a form of social obligation, courtship norms, and even PUA-like tactics back then for many people and not always the sincere original poetry modern people like us might think it is. Its a lot of people lifting phrases and ideas from others to please or even manipulate current or potential lovers. Some of these soldiers had several women back home and wrote many letters to all of them, maximizing their odds of a relationship or sex when they are discharged. While I certainly believe in romantic love, I also think its important to remember people in the past weren't different from us and some of this is disingenuous writing or seen as honest but exaggerated rote obligation, and not often this expression of deep love that suddenly turns a dullard borderline illiterate into a prolific writer of poetic love letters. This is a practiced pretension and artform and our history has always had elaborate courtship ritual just like near any other animal has. We just don't practice this often today, but if you decided to learn the art of love letters, you'd be just as good as any of these people over time I imagine. You probably won't because that's seen as an out of style courtship ritual, and instead you probably are good at other, more modern, courtship rituals.
stevenwoo 3y ago
Life was much slower paced, and it sounds like all these letters are on very high quality paper for the time so it makes sense these were very deliberate expression of communication. These undelivered letters from wives and mothers to their husbands serving aboard a French warship that was captured are like a snapshot in time, and the historian writes that many were possibly written by scribes hired for their literacy. To give some idea of how much slower paced, the tragedy of the one wife who died a year after sending her letter who probably never knew the fate of her husband.

kogus 3y ago

I'm not sure if overall literacy rates were as high in the past (in the sense of "what percentage of people can read"), but among those who could read, the level of reading and writing skill was dramatically higher. Consider that the works of Charles Dickens were released serially, and crowds of people thronged stores to pick up the latest addition to his stories when they arrived. Those are not books that a typical modern reader would find accessible.

jon-wood 3y ago
A modern reader would consider them inaccessible mostly because of the archaic language and period references, which of course at the time were neither. Likewise with Shakespeare who we think of as incredibly high brow now, forcing schoolchildren to spend weeks poring over the language, but who at the time was writing the equivalent of soap operas and sitcoms in order to sell as many tickets as possible.
- dragontamer 3y ago
  Ah yes, Shakespeare is so high brow. >> My naked weapon is out. -- IIRC Romeo and Juliet but I forget exactly where. Double entendres are all over the place.
  - bigstrat2003 3y ago
    My favorite example is the "nothing" scene between Hamlet and Ophelia, where the whole thing is a double entendre for her pussy. Shakespeare was so, so dirty and a lot of people have no idea.
    - jerf 3y ago
      I think we shouldn't teach Shakespeare in school, because there is negative value in holding up something incomprehensible to students as the Height of Culture. I can't think of a better way to turn students off to "culture". If one wanted to design a program to turn students off to culture, I can hardly think of a better one. And probably my best proof that absolutely nobody involved understands it is the complete and total obliviousness to the double entendres. If the teachers realized how dirty it was they might think twice about teaching it. If the parents realized it, there would be protests. But nobody realizes it. Nobody has a clue. Nobody understands what is being said at all. They're just all pretending because if you don't Get Shakespeare you're a stupid dum dum who is drooling your stupid all over your stupid face. But basically nobody at that level does Get Shakespeare and they are just pretending. This is not only not a good use of educational time, it's actively bad. So many students are going to be inclined to think education is a waste of time under the best of circumstances anyhow... why do we go to such efforts to prove them 100% correct? But we have to keep teaching it. Because anyone who suggests that we should stop is obviously a stupid dum dum drooling stupid all over their stupid face, and who wants to be seen with a person like that?
      - swells34 3y ago
        Agreed. I think it should be taught, but taught from the HISTORICAL perspective, not from an arts/culture one. "This is an example of low brow comedy from a certain era" rather than "This is the greatest set of plays ever written". I got nothing out of Shakespeare culture wise, and mostly was just quite angry at having to read it.
      - bigstrat2003 3y ago
        I think that this is throwing the baby out with the bath water. I didn't fully get Shakespeare in high school, but I certainly found it to be interesting and beautiful. Not everyone does or will, but that's true for literally everything we teach in schools.
      - vkou 3y ago
        A Shakespeare play is fine for a high school curriculum. It would be a good contrast for more modern works, and it is an important cultural touchstone. But there's no good reason to cover four, or five of them. Just pick one, struggle through it, and then go analyse three or four works of modern theatre, and modern penny theatre. Half the point of schooling is trying to instill interest in a subject. Nothing instills disinterest in theatre like spending 80% of your mental energy trying to figure out what the hell the words mean. Shakespeare is meant to be seen. Shakespeare is meant to be parsable with no mental effort by the 16-th century groundlings with the rotten fruit and a strong desire to throw it. Shakespeare in grade 8-12 English is neither of those things.
- 1123581321 3y ago
  Shakespeare is very funny and crude, but he also wielded a larger vocabulary than we're used to in our penny theatre (TV shows, popular YA books, etc.) We also know that, if nothing else, poetry is good exercising for both sides of the brain, and most people won't bother with it outside of school. (There are more reasons to teach these things but I'm setting them aside.) We don't even try to teach what was considered scholarly in 1600, let alone in Latin and French. Those works were also considered archaic back then, too.
  - supertofu 3y ago
    I remember reading an unabridged edition of Huck Finn in 7th grade that my mom had in her book collection. I was shocked at how different it read than our assigned copies. And no, I'm not talking about the racial slurs. The abridged version was in a simplified English, paragraphs and whole chapters had been edited out or reordered, whereas the unabridged version was a colorful and playful style of English such that I had never before encountered. I was a voracious reader and it still took me a month or so to get through the unabridged version of the book. I had to "translate" the witticisms and puns, but came to realize in time that Mark Twain was exceptionally clever, very funny, and not at all as racist as the volume of N-words would have it appear. (For the record, I'm Black). Nowadays, I doubt any schoolchild gets exposure to unabridged anything unless they have a parent with archaic book collections.
- bmitc 3y ago
  I am fairly certain that that does not explain it away and that reading levels among those who are literate have indeed dropped significantly. When your primary form of entertainment and learning is long form reading, it isn't a big surprise.
  - foldr 3y ago
    In the case of Shakespeare, it doesn't make sense to look at the reading level of 16th century Londoners because they were watching his plays, not reading them.
    - bmitc 3y ago
      Well that's the problem with these game of telephone discussions. We went from the 18th century to the 19th and then all the way back to the 16th. Note that I didn't comment on Shakespeare specifically.
- Exoristos 3y ago
  Dickens didn't write in archaic language.
SoftTalker 3y ago
Books were the entertainment of the day. In recent times people thronged movie theaters to see Star Wars or Harry Potter.
pm3003 3y ago
The public scribes of the times (who were dictated a good part of the letters in the article) are well documented, and what I read of them is coherent with these letters. The language is very informal. Since the guys were paid by word or page, they just wrote whatever was dictated. Hence the informal language. The first letter reads something like: "Your father-in-law greets you your sister greets you your brother I haven't seen since Mrs XXXX has asked news from you please pass my compliments to YYYY his wife alone gives me news from you." This was possibly a letter from someone who could hardly read anything else than a prayer book (or had eye problems) to someone who couldn't read at all. The language here is very modern, only a few outdated expressions. I've had much more trouble with professional letters from Napoleonic times, full of abbreviations and references to old social, judicial or political structures and procedures.

monadINtop 3y ago

>tended to use meme/gifs in place of what I'd consider "real" communication You don't consider humour a form of real communication? Are you sure you should be looking down on them

dirtyhippiefree 3y ago
2021 is considered old news, but this continues to be increasingly true…Memes Are Dead… https://www.dazeddigital.com/life-culture/article/55120/1/2021-was-the-year-the-millennial-meme-died-devil-wears-prada-actual-villain?amp=1 https://www.dazeddigital.com/life-culture/article/55120/1/20...
- almostnormal 3y ago
  Not every picture with text is a meme. To become a meme it requires a certain level of distribution. The real ones are difficult to spot and may completely be lost among the wannabe-meme-pictures.
  - Terr_ 3y ago
    > To become a meme it requires a certain level of distribution. By that logic, there's no such thing as a rare [joke/insult/song], because all real [jokes/insults/songs] are already popular by definition. > The real ones are difficult to spot and may completely be lost Hold up, that contradicts the sentence before it: Any meme that has that "certain level of distribution" shouldn't be so "difficult to spot."
    - function_seven 3y ago
      By definition, a meme is memetic. It "self-replicates" from one person's mind to another's in an anologous way to how genes propagate. A meme that fails to attain some sort of popularity doesn't meet the criteria. Like a gene that fails to propagate itself. An evolutionary dead-end.
      - 3y ago

dirtyhippiefree 3y ago

For a decade news aggregators have demonstrated people don’t want to read two sentences together and we’re stuck with videos that suck massive amounts of time…sadly…

zoeysmithe 3y ago

You're reading cherry-picked letters from verbose and emotional writers, not random Joes. The poorly written ones don't make it to venues like this. Comparing this to someone's busy social media feed is a bit disingenuous. Not to mention for all you know, some of these people can write love letters like this, but why should you know that? You're not the object of their love. The same way probably no one in these people's lives knew they wrote love letters like this while they were alive. Not to mention that "love letter writing" was a form of social obligation, courtship norms, and even PUA-like tactics back then for many people and not always the sincere original poetry modern people like us might think it is. Its a lot of people lifting phrases and ideas from others to please or even manipulate current or potential lovers. Some of these soldiers had several women back home and wrote many letters to all of them, maximizing their odds of a relationship or sex when they are discharged. While I certainly believe in romantic love, I also think its important to remember people in the past weren't different from us and some of this is disingenuous writing or seen as honest but exaggerated rote obligation, and not often this expression of deep love that suddenly turns a dullard borderline illiterate into a prolific writer of poetic love letters. This is a practiced pretension and artform and our history has always had elaborate courtship ritual just like near any other animal has. We just don't practice this often today, but if you decided to learn the art of love letters, you'd be just as good as any of these people over time I imagine. You probably won't because that's seen as an out of style courtship ritual, and instead you probably are good at other, more modern, courtship rituals.

stevenwoo 3y ago

Life was much slower paced, and it sounds like all these letters are on very high quality paper for the time so it makes sense these were very deliberate expression of communication. These undelivered letters from wives and mothers to their husbands serving aboard a French warship that was captured are like a snapshot in time, and the historian writes that many were possibly written by scribes hired for their literacy. To give some idea of how much slower paced, the tragedy of the one wife who died a year after sending her letter who probably never knew the fate of her husband.