You can't have too many apostrophe's

Commcat, you are correct; our standards have dropped absymally low, and we don't seem to care.

We do have entertainment such as "Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader", which, of course, is not nearly as entertaining as the latest blockbuster with gratuitous violence (deceptively called "Action", as if there's no action in a movie without gore). If we were to actually assess skill level, Paul might be correct.

Paul, I understand your internal drive for excellence. Most people honestly do not have that degree of concern over such things. You are a man of the printed word, as you pore over articles, books, etc. That's my world as well, so we tend to be critical of such errors. Most people aren't even close to that level of involvement with the printed word. The average man reads less than one book each year. Making sure his grammar is correct is not going to a serious concern for him. When people have an average to marginal commitment to communication excellence (or lack the means to attain it) it won't happen from outside influences critiquing them.

Society is moving toward increasing illiteracy (Yup, higher interaction with decreasing literacy - not a good combination. It yields more "combatants".), which will have catastrophic consequences. I consider us to have moved into a new Dark Age socially, and in many respects intellectually. People are primed full of information (information overload) with a wretched World View and little means of productively communicating frustrations, needs, etc. Communication breakdowns, which used to be seen in very unstable homes, are now commonplace.

Rage is replacing verbal expression (Has anyone stopped to think that when speech is considered a Hate Crime and people feel pent up anger, they'll explode? Can anyone laugh off a negative comment anymore?). Years ago, when the first highly pubicized serial killings took place (I believe it was Columbine which spurred my comment) I said we'd see this weekly or daily in the years ahead. It's happening. I predict we will see a positive correlation between prosecution of verbal hate crimes and mass murders, i.e. as people feel more constrained to express themselves, they will simply explode with hatred, at times lethally. We are literally ratcheting up the tension, anger and violence in our society.

I could go on (I know, some of you are screaming at your computer, "Shut up, already!" Please avoid verbal hate crimes. Thank you!), but I won't.

Scrape the surface of poor communication in human interaction and you get... social catastrophe.

It's amazing what apostrophes, or rather misplaced ones, may indicate.

Assessing the state of communication in the world today, the condition is not apostrophic but catastrophic.

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Mrtennis, I am not interested in preparing a report for you. I think it's obvious that I was stating some opinons as well as some facts which would be difficult to contest.

Some of my points are well documented and need no regurgitation of evidence:

Society is becoming more illiterate
Information overload is prevalent
Family breakdown is widespread
Expressions of physical hostility and violence are increasing (i.e. serial killing; I am well aware that some forms of violence are decreasing, i.e. individual homicides, which has been linked to the aging of the Baby Boomers)

Some comments are opinions:
My take on TV and movie entertainment
"I consider..." us to have moved into a new Dark Age
People... with a wretched World View...
"I predict we'll see a correlation..."

Feel free to sift it as you wish. :)

MrTennis, This entire thread has been off topic. Google is handy to check what I have suggested are facts. We tend to disagree a lot. My goal is not to be provocative but informative. If that is mistaken as some form of aggression, my apologies. :)

I'm done. When the question is: What is the criterion for illiteracy," I'm out, since it's a game of nothing more than intellectual regress. This is why I address you as "MrObfuscation". As a parting handful of sand as I exit the sandbox, Google "illiteracy violent crime" and see what you get.

Blessings to you, no hard feelings. :)

Glory, Haha, have to laugh; my mind is already past that. A joke along that line didn't even enter my mind.

What you see was my feeble attempt to inject a coded language into the mix. It reads, "I think we should communicate by code," or similar. I used a script in Word to convert it, and while in Word it looked great - a bunch of interesting pictographic characters - before I pasted it in.

However, it pasted as what you see. I thought maybe it could be lifted/copied and then converted back to English once returned to Word. Failed.

The boxes with numeration indicate the letters I used, but the grand scheme was a write off. I thought it might be interesting to be able to cut and paste a simple pictographic coded message. If it had worked I would have waited to see if anyone figured it out, but I was foiled.

T_bone, I typed it properly in MS Word originally, not backwards, and if I used caps that was entirely coincidental, as when I assessed the sample font it was in all caps. No intent to shout at anyone, just to try something different. Yelling never entered my mind, but thanks for the reminder. :)

I think you're right; I originally was using some pictographic font, but in the process of trying to cut and paste, trying different things in MS Word, I used the Greek font but forgot I had done so.

My guess is that the conversion was rendered impossible because of pasting the entire block of words and the conversion program was not able to handle that kind of target. The frustrating thing is that I even used proper grammar! ;)