the.com/literacy
The original mind-reading technology — still undefeated after 5,000 years.
means The ability to read and write — the basic skill of turning marks on a surface into meaning and back again.
from Built in the 1800s from 'literate,' which traces to Latin 'litteratus' (marked with letters, lettered, educated), from 'littera' meaning a letter of the alphabet. The word arrived as the mirror image of 'illiteracy,' which actually came first — for centuries English only needed a word for NOT being able to read, since that was the default state; the positive term 'literacy' had to be coined afterward to name the skill once it became something worth naming.
- brain rewiring
- Learning to read restructures visual cortex itself
- invented independently
- At least four times, continents apart
- global gap
- 765 million adults still cannot read a sentence
- silent reading
- Was so rare Augustine wrote about it stunned