I possess a few early letters from a young ancestor who left the family farm in Southern Ontario to cut down the white pine farther north at the turn of the last century. They are written in a childish hand, grossly misspelled, and at what I would today judge as a Grade 3/4 level.

In one, he says that he got drunk on whiskey one night and got into a fight that was not his fault (his emphasis). He then assures his family that he reads his Bible faithfully each night in the bunkhouse. He ends by greeting his mother and father, sisters and brothers, cousins, aunts and uncles, spelling their names lovingly.

Was my ancestor a fully literate man? Well, he could do much more than sign his name in the enlistment rolls or the parish register. He was far more literate than the generations that preceded him. He worked, saved his money, moved farther west, bought a farm, kept his accounts, stayed in touch.

He was a functionally literate man, measured by the standards of his day.

But the "literacy bar" keeps rising. Our expectations of mass literacy soared in the 20th century. Yes, I know, we are fond of saying that literacy is "on the decline." But listen to Nicholas Lemann, recently writing in The New Yorker:

"In 1900, only six per cent of American eighteen-year-olds had a high-school diploma; by 1960, seventy per cent did ... And the increases in the American high-school population came at a time when ... our schools were taking in students from a wide variety of ethnic backgrounds and national experiences."⁽⁶⁾

The World Health Organization identifies mass literacy as a major indicator of the health of a society. I believe that the plain language movement is a friend and champion of mass literacy, imperfect as it is.

By the end of the Second World War, a plain language champion we will all recognize emerged. His essay was an inspiration to me when I was a young, aspiring journalist. Many parts of it have not aged well for me on re-reading -- there is a certain fussiness and particularity about his language likes and dislikes that no longer appeals.