A look at the latest stage of our regression to total collective illiteracy

Thursday 12/11/25

We've now entered the stage of our regression to total collective illiteracy in which major media outlets don't understand the difference between "apart" and "a part." Keep an eye out--you'll notice now, if you're capable of noticing things. They are opposites! So if you write "apart" when you mean "a part" then you're not saying what you think you are!

Want to do another one? You will also notice many people of late using the word "articulation" to try and sound smart. Doesn't mean what you think it does! Such people think, "Yeah...someone else would say that this statement I encountered was articulate, but I'm gonna show people I'm smarter by kicking it up a notch...'nice articulation.' Yeah...good for me...See? I am special."

You are not! Gonna want to look that word "articulation" up. I'll stay on the line...

See? Woah! Not what you thought, right?

Want to do another? Note how many people now do the "I'm going to kick it up a level and show how smart I am" thing with the word "singular." Instead of saying the word. "single," when it's the clear word to use, they try and impress you.

Go ahead and look up the word "singular." Again, I'll hold...

What do you know, right!!!! Doesn't mean what you thought it did, does it?

I can break this down very simply. Watch:

"I had a single meatball."

"I had a singular meatball."

The first instance means you ate just one meatball. Good for you. Meatballs are bad for you. People are so heavy these days, and they balloon up more at the holidays, which is also when they're most likely to have a heart attack. That's true--you can look that up as well.

The first instance means you had a very distinctive meatball that is unlike other meatballs. Get it? It's like there's a difference between having a single problem and a singular problem, though your single problem can also be a singular problem.

Let's do one more. Follows the same pattern: Someone wants to try and make themselves look smarter than they are, which is all the riskier of a proposition because they're not smart at all. People want to get very angry when you say the truth. Here's the thing: Intelligence is also a choice to some degree. But it's a powerful degree. No, you can't decide to become brilliant, but almost everyone can choose to become much smarter. You can try. You can learn. You can make the effort.

I learn new things every day. Many new things. Each day of my life. I consciously set about this. I make the effort. Look this up, read that, think through this idea, ask these questions, seek those answers, etc.

How many people do you think ever learn something new? How many people do you think learn something new each day? Two days a week?

Practically no one, right? They do the same thing. Each day is just another version of the days that came before. And no, seeing the results of the football game that happened that day--"Oh shit the Bills won"--isn't what I mean by learning something. How many people do you think look up a word they don't know? Ever?

These people are going to be pretty stupid, aren't they? Just like these people could choose to be smarter. A lot of it is up to you. People can make themselves intellectually respectable by being intellectually responsible. The brain is a muscle. Everything is a muscle. I condition my leg muscles running stairs in the Bunker Hill Monument. There's a brain-based version of that as well. I'm not "judging" people in terms of what they were born with like that's some done deal and it can't be helped.

You can help it. You owe it to yourself and the world. And when you don't, you're selfish, blighted, and not much good to anyone. You're the problem.

But like I said, one more. Same idea. A person knows to say the word "artistic," but in trying to make themselves sound smarter, they go with "aesthetic."

"Yeah...she's really aesthetic."

Doesn't work like that. Different meanings! Look them up...

See? Very different meanings.

But when people do this, other people have no clue what the word "aesthetic" means either. Because they don't know anything. See? It's unchecked. Nothing to stop this. No one can tell what anything is. Free-for-all of stupidity.

That other person thinks, "Huh...my boy here sounds really smart...I'd like to get in on that..." And the next time this other guy is talking and trying to look impressive, he's dropping in a singular, an aesthetic, an articulation.

Understand?

I know, it's very hard. Sleepy time now.

Arm a person with buzz words and you make them exhausting. These buzz words are also like sticks placed between the spokes of a once spinning wheel.

The ways in which people use the word "followers"--and the automatic, unquestioned deferment to its quintessence--is telling. An example:

Crazy how we lose followers because of how we love. But that is ok.

This person has no idea how that sounds, how they sound, what this means, how backwards they have what's really going to be everything in life. Social media followers and love have nothing to do with each other.

How can people not see how social media works? It's about what's the most boring, stupid, vague. It rewards being those things and being a mediocre person with nothing to offer save that mediocrity--or worse--so that someone else can think, "I'm as good as them."

You'd think--in theory--that book publishers would be able to understand this. That person doesn't have the followers they do because anyone finds them interesting. It's because that person sucks and doesn't have anything of any tangible value or importance, either that they've written or to say.

We are at the time of the year when all the people who said this year was going to be different at this time of the year last year are saying this year was awful and next year will be different but who are going to keep doing the exact same things. See you again December 11, 2026!

A post I just saw from a profile with 65,000 followers:

The 2025 Michigan season ending with a Sherrone Moore mugshot was NOT on anybody’s prediction list at the start of the year

There are only idiots now, pretty much. Imagine if someone "predicted" on January 1, 2025, that the Michigan football coach was going to cheat on his wife--actually, this is the norm with anyone who has money or has or thinks they have power--with a staffer, threaten to kill the staffer and whatever else went down, and have his mugshot appear after his arrest.

That's not a thing. It's not a type of prediction. Imagine someone predicting things like who is going to commit crimes and transgress like mad at the beginning of a year? "I think the coach of such and such a team will be popped for raping people. I got him on my rape bingo card."

Vegas doesn't put out a line on what terrible things Lorin "How Bad Do You Want to Be Published" Stein will do in 2026. That be one twisted over/under.

The post makes no sense. It's what someone who can't think would post. Hence, it gets those likes. From other morons and man-children. Right?

But the all caps definitely sells it. Nice job. Good rhetorical save. Needed that crowning touch/emphatic burst of clarification.

Again: How can anyone fail to see how this works? Oh...that's right...we're back to that big problem again, aren't we?

News station/outlet headline, by the way:

Former Michigan football coach Sherrone Moore jailed, hours after his firing

That's not how commas work.

The single biggest problem in a world that is almost entirely massive problems now. When people can't tell what things are, things just keep getting worse, and there's nothing that can be done about it. Then it's all just horrors that happen, unchecked. Pluck out everyone's eyes, and it's a free for all of doom, destruction, devolution. And those people won't even know what's happening to them, but it certainly does to happen to them.