PIAAC defines literacy as “the ability to understand, evaluate, use and engage with written texts to participate in society, to achieve one’s goals, and to develop one’s knowledge and potential”
This is not the commonplace definition of literacy. Open any dictionary you want and you won’t find anything even close to this definition. (E.g. Cambridge Dictionary) Open any work on the history of language and writing and you won’t see this definition. Ask random people in the street what the word means and they will simply say it’s the ability to read and write. What the link provides is a secondary, far more specific meaning that was invented in a thoroughly literate society where the traditional meaning of illiteracy has become irrelevant because everyone is already literate.
So in order to get a ‘one up’ on the person you disagree with, you’re purposefully misreading a definition and insist the simpler definition is more correct because… you think it says something different?
You didn’t provide any definition when you made the first claim, there was no definition to misread. The meaning used by the vast majority of people ever is the default expected reading - which you did actually expect readers to use as well, since it would help in underscoring your ridiculous criticism. If you added the new (and vague and untestable and not used in many other countries) definition immediately in the initial comment, it would dampen the dramatic effect.
This is not the commonplace definition of literacy. Open any dictionary you want and you won’t find anything even close to this definition. (E.g. Cambridge Dictionary) Open any work on the history of language and writing and you won’t see this definition. Ask random people in the street what the word means and they will simply say it’s the ability to read and write. What the link provides is a secondary, far more specific meaning that was invented in a thoroughly literate society where the traditional meaning of illiteracy has become irrelevant because everyone is already literate.
So in order to get a ‘one up’ on the person you disagree with, you’re purposefully misreading a definition and insist the simpler definition is more correct because… you think it says something different?
I fear you might be a part of the problem.
You didn’t provide any definition when you made the first claim, there was no definition to misread. The meaning used by the vast majority of people ever is the default expected reading - which you did actually expect readers to use as well, since it would help in underscoring your ridiculous criticism. If you added the new (and vague and untestable and not used in many other countries) definition immediately in the initial comment, it would dampen the dramatic effect.