Towering Babble

(First published in Bali Advertiser, January 18, 2006)

What we’ve got here is failure to communicate. – Captain, Road Prison 36 (Strother Martin), in the 1967 movie ‘Cool Hand Luke’

Most of you reading this will not understand it. The US Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics said in November that “prose literacy” among national university graduates fell to 31 percent in 2003, from 40 percent in 1992. Among those with post-graduate degrees, prose proficiency fell to 41 percent from 51 percent over the same time span. And that’s in the country with supposedly the best university system in the world. (Christian Science Monitor, Dec. 29, 2005)

Accepting those percentages as a universal marker – problematic I realize – would mean maybe a third of the Bali Advertiser readership comprehends what the columnists write. If an argument can be made that some English-speaking countries teach the basics of education better than the US, then whatever comprehension percentage gained among native English readers is likely offset by the many people reading the paper in a second language.

It is distressing to contemplate that written words have such a low efficiency rate. Even assuming that a writer has put down what he means to say – and the low “prose literacy” rate in reading puts that in doubt – there is no guarantee he has communicated his thoughts to a reader. “Letters to the Editor” sections often carry examples where someone clearly mistook a commentator’s or reporter’s meaning. Perhaps a satirical tone was missed. Perhaps a quick read gave the reader only an impression of what the author was saying. Maybe the reader doesn’t “do” nuance, preferring or needing instead the prose equivalent of a two-by-four smack between the eyes.

Many people right now are congratulating themselves on being in the third with reading proficiency. But how do they know? Consider this: most incompetent people don’t know they are incompetent, according to studies conducted in the 1990s by Dr. David A. Dunning, a professor of psychology at Cornell University in New York. The problem, Dr. Dunning believed, is that “the skills required for competence often are the same skills necessary to recognize competence,” (according to a Jan. 18, 2000 article in the New York Times).

In tests designed to compare ability versus self-evaluation, people scoring in the lowest percentiles consistently over-rated their performance. Specifically, test subjects scoring in the 10th percentile on the grammar test ranked themselves in the 67th percentile in their ability to “identify grammatically correct standard English.” On the test of logical reasoning, subjects scoring in the 12th percentile ranked their reasoning skill in the 68th percentile.

The possibility we must contemplate, then, is that only a small percentage of people in the world are intelligent, and nobody is certain who the intelligent ones are – not even the intelligent themselves (only the unintelligent would fail to think of the possibility that they aren’t really intelligent, just incompetent). Moreover, none of us can ever be sure that we are reading, writing, talking, or communicating in a language or representational system with any accuracy, understanding, or comprehension.

So, going by the US Dept. of Education statistics and Dr. Dunning’s study, a few readers are nodding along; the rest are bewildered, maybe cursing me for calling them stupid, maybe happily oblivious they have missed my meaning … or maybe I have just been writing gibberish ever since I left the safe ground of quoting articles in the Christian Science Monitor and the New York Times … which I may not have understood anyway.

Language brings only the illusion of understanding. Basic reading and writing is so widespread in most societies we forget it is a skill humanity learned slowly. Even when two people speak the same language, communication is hard and has to be worked at. I once told a British friend my favorite activity as a youth was “shagging flies.” I was referring to my baseball playing days, when practice included hours of “shagging” -- or catching -- pop flies, that is, baseballs hit high into the air to be caught by the fielders. “Shagging flies,” of course, has a different meaning in British parlance, and my friend did not hold the image I meant to convey.

All of which goes to demonstrate the level of insanity displayed by English-speaking persons when they abuse an unlucky service person that doesn’t immediately grasp the meaning of their pidgin Indo-English … or post signs along rice field paths warning in English against dumping household garbage in the streams … or plea – again in English in big red letters -- that farmers in the area stop poisoning the dogs and stealing the water pumps. It demonstrates, too, the folly of anyone who thinks conversational ability in a language gives them instant access to the philosophy, symbolism, and collective spirit that is its underlying basis.

Not even talk, it would seem, is easy.

Copyright © 2006 Lee Roy LeRoi