We have to understand the context

From E.D. Hirsch's Cultural Literacy.

The recently rediscovered insight that literacy is more than a skill is based upon knowledge that all of us unconsciously have about language. We know instinctively that to understand what somebody is saying, we must understand more than the surface meanings of words; we have to understand the context as well. The need for background information applies all the more to reading and writing. To grasp the words on a page we have to know a lot of information that isn't set down on the page

.

The chief function of literacy is to make us masters of this standard instrument of knowledge

From E.D. Hirsch's Cultural Literacy.

The chief function of literacy is to make us masters of this standard instrument of knowledge and communication, thereby enabling us to give and receive complex information orally and in writing over time and space. Advancing technology, with its constant need for fast and complex communications, has made literacy ever more essential to commerce and domestic life.

Where communications fail, so do the undertakings

From E.D. Hirsch's Cultural Literacy.

Why is literacy so important in the modern world? Some of the reasons, like the need to fill out forms or get a good job, are so obvious that they needn't be discussed. But the chief reason is broader. The complex undertakings of modern life depend on cooperation of many people with different specialties in different places. Where communications fail, so do the undertakings. (That is the moral of the story of the Tower of Babel.) The function of national literacy is to foster effective nationwide communications. Our chief instrument of communication over time and space is the standard national language, which is sustained by national literacy. Mature literacy alone enables the tower to be built, the business to be well managed, and the airplane to fly without crashing. All nationwide communications, whether by telephone, radio, TV, or writing are fundamentally dependent upon literacy, for the essence of literacy is not simply reading and writing but also the effective use of the standard literate language.

A kind of easy-going panache

From Priscilla Napier's A Late Beginner, available directly from Slightly Foxed. "Priscilla Napier grew up in Egypt during the last golden years of the Edwardian Age - a time when, for her parents' generation, it seemed the sun would never set upon 'the regimental band playing selections from HMS Pinafore under the banyan tree.'"

Recounting her visits home to England in the early teens of the last century, when she would have been three to six years of age, she offers this recollection of those magnificent servants of the crown; a more positive (and probably more deserved) judgment than has been the fashion of late to offer.

Not all Edwardian men can have had such very long legs: possibly it was one's viewpoint that gave one this impression. Their far up faces, above unaccountably deep collars, seemed always to be breaking into laughter. Their salient characteristic was their relaxedness, a kind of easy-going panache glossing theirs words and actions. Their legs in narrow trousers carrying them inexhaustibly up hill, or thrown, in gleaming leggings, over a horse's back, moved with an unhurried and purposeful elan. Their voices, heard in mockery, affection, or sternness, rang always with that confident buoyancy that was to sink for ever in the mud of the Great War battlefields, with that unquestioning sense of the rightness and fitness of the Pax Britannica and of their place within it. They basked in what they imagined to be its high noon, in what were in fact its last rays, in the sun never setting upon the regimental band playing selections from H.M.S. Pinafore under the banyan tree. Consciously Christians, of a sort, they fought the good fight against an excess in drinking, smoking, or spending; against paying insufficient regard to mothers-in-law or dull old relations. They believed in practically everything except Father Christmas and votes for women, and it made for great peace of mind. Straddling the world, with their graceful wives and their strangely over-dressed babies, they believed in marital fidelity and in kindness to animals which included their rapid despatch when they were being shot, hunted, or fished for. They believed in right and wrong, with a strong line drawn between. They were listening without self-consciousness to the last faint echoes of Roland's horn. They said family prayers, and made endless practical jokes, and tipped one golden half sovereigns. To later critics they could be said to have lived in an innocent, callous, enjoying dream, in some ways perhaps never quite growing up. But they were true to their ethic, and remained, even to people who were not their relations, curiously lovable. Their self-mastery, and not only or mainly in sexual matters, was truly adult; and when the appalling calamity of World War I avalanched over them, they confronted it without self-pity. From their loss we all still suffer. In their rare and more perspicacious survivor, Churchill, we all rejoice. There was something marvellously entire about them.

Define: Plug-ugly

Wodehouse is a great logo coach (word coach?). I never realized quite how much he probably contributed to the development of my youthful vocabulary until I recently reread Jeeves in the Morning and was struck by how many allusions he made to things that ought to be known but that I probably did not really know enough about or used words that I have always just interpreted from the context of his use.

Plug-ugly for instance. I have managed to work it, improbably, into a conversation or two over the years but actually never had a precise definition beyond my inference from Wodehouse.

I had also had to be similarly firm with Jeeves, who had repeatedly hinted his wish that I should take a cottage there for the summer months. There was, it appeared, admirable fishing in the river, and he is a man who dearly loves to flick the baited hook. "No, Jeeves," I had been compelled to say, "much though it pains me to put a stopper on your simple pleasures, I cannot take a risk of running into that gang of pluguglies. Safety first." And he had replied, "Very good, sir," and there the matter had rested.

From Merriam-Webster.

Main Entry: plug-ug ly
Function: noun
Date: 1856

Amid the bustle of waiters, the chink of fine silver and the hum of dozens of conversations,

For any independent reader who is a Sherlock Holmes enthusiast (as I was at that age), there was an article in the January 2010 Smithsonian, Sherlock Holmes' London, which might be of interest.

One summer evening in 1889, a young medical school graduate named Arthur Conan Doyle arrived by train at London's Victoria Station and took a hansom cab two and a half miles north to the famed Langham Hotel on Upper Regent Street. Then living in obscurity in the coastal town of Southsea, near Portsmouth, the 30-year-old ophthalmologist was looking to advance his writing career. The magazine Beeton's Christmas Annual had recently published his novel, A Study in Scarlet, which introduced the private detective Sherlock Holmes. Now Joseph Marshall Stoddart, managing editor of Lippincott's Monthly, a Philadelphia magazine, was in London to establish a British edition of his publication. At the suggestion of a friend, he had invited Conan Doyle to join him for dinner in the Langham's opulent dining room.

Amid the bustle of waiters, the chink of fine silver and the hum of dozens of conversations, Conan Doyle found Stoddart to be "an excellent fellow," he would write years later. But he was captivated by one of the other invited guests, an Irish playwright and author named Oscar Wilde. "His conversation left an indelible impression upon my mind," Conan Doyle remembered. "He had a curious precision of statement, a delicate flavour of humour, and a trick of small gestures to illustrate his meaning." For both writers, the evening would prove a turning point. Wilde left with a commission to write his novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, which appeared in Lippincott's June 1890 issue. And Conan Doyle agreed to produce a second novel starring his ace detective; The Sign of Four would cement his reputation. Indeed, critics have speculated that the encounter with Wilde, an exponent of a literary movement known as the Decadents, led Conan Doyle to deepen and darken Sherlock Holmes' character: in The Sign of Four's opening scene, Holmes is revealed to be addicted to a "seven-percent solution" of cocaine.

Children's literature, bad books and ideas

In an article (Children's Literature by Feroza Jussawalla in College Literature, October 1997) otherwise marked by academic gibberish and predetermined strawmen imposed willy-nilly upon reality, Feroza Jussawalla quotes this line from Peter Hunt from his book An Introduction to Children's Literature, my emphasis added:

Children's literature is a powerful literature, and . . . such power cannot be neutral or innocent, or trivial. This is especially true because the books are written by and made available to children, by adults .. Equally obviously, the primary audience is children, who are less experienced and less educated into their culture than adults.

I think this is in part the answer to an enduring conundrum presented to book enthusiasts when assaulted with the charge that books are dangerous because of the ideas or prejudices or values that they transmit. (And to be clear, this is an equal opportunity charge coming as it does from either left or right.) The conundrum is that as soon as one advances the belief, indeed the conviction, of the importance of books to children - as most bibliophiles do - then one must accept that books can have negative consequences as well as positive consequences.

I believe the charge to be true, books are a potentially powerful influence either for good or bad, but that the bibliophiles answer lies in Hunt's statement "books are written by and made available to children, by adults." Bad values, or stereotypes, or prejudice, or facts received via books are not inherently corruptive - it is the context in which they are received, and vis-a-vis children, the mediation of parents and adults that determines whether the ideas, values, etc. are affirmative or corruptive in nature.

It is important for a child to have their parents shaping the portfolio of books to which they are exposed (and in what sequence) and it is important for there to be reasonable variety which would include variety not only in subject, style, genre, etc. but also in terms of issues, values, and ideas. The impact of those ideas are substantially filtered through the prior influence of the parent in shaping the child's weltanschauung as well as the discussion the parent might have about those ideas as the child reads. It is not the book in itself that might be the problem but rather the environment and context in which it is read.