Is ableist to have long words in books?

Lol these 1 dollar words are ruining lives out here.

Write your own book then , with short easy to understand words, instead of asking a story be changed and bothering someone else's expression

They need to get a dictionary or a thesaurus

Transcript:

Is it ableist to have difficult words in your books, such as words that are more than two syllables long? Some people think so, including this person.

"There is absolutely nothing wrong with readers asking for easier words. If that upsets you so much, check your ableism."

I'm not entirely sure that this person knows what ableism is. I am disabled with a neuroimmune condition, so I'll offer a quick definition. It is discrimination against people with disabilities. But this, on the other hand, almost reminds me of saying it's like fat-phobic to have salads on a restaurant menu. It's not. We already know that there's a literacy crisis in America. Over half of US adults read below a sixth grade level. And by the way, the books that I, and possibly you if you are an avid reader, were reading in sixth grade are not the books that this data refers to when it says sixth grade level. They mean books like this, Holes, which are not all that challenging and should not represent the maximum difficulty that a grown adult can read. A study also found that the number of Americans reading every day has declined three percent each year from 2003 to 2023.

Do you think it's a good idea to have a nation or world filled with people who are incapable of reading a text any more complex than a paragraph from this book and understanding what it means? It reminds me of this film, Wall-E, where everyone is just a mindless consumer. And it's more than that. If you have read 1984 by George Orwell, you might remember that the government gradually cut down on the amount of words the people were allowed to use. And while that was the result of a totalitarian regime, rather than people willingly giving this up on their own as a result of not reading books anymore, the ultimate result was that people in Orwell's world were unable to have complex thoughts, and thus revolutionary thoughts.

Language is the structure with which we construct thoughts, and if we don't have complex language, if we no longer understand complex language, we will no longer be able to have those complex thoughts and will be happy to just consume slop. Reading will become a thing of the past, something for boring old people and weirdos. In some circles, it already is. And I think that positioning people with intellectual ambition as ableist is a way to almost shame people into being lazy and ignorant. Nerds used to get bullied, but now it's not just nerds who are really into calculus, it's people who can fucking read. As someone who faces legitimate ableism due to my chronic illness, I think it's a complete cop-out to say that challenging people with words they might not know is ableist. There is nothing wrong with being upset about the fact that our reading skills as a country, and probably as a world, are declining at a rapid pace as our screen time goes up and our attention spans continue to shrink. And in the end, we become less and less aware of what we are even missing.

I get so excited when I am reading and I come across an unfamiliar word.

Public education teaches down to the lowest common denominator, by design. These are the fruits of its labor.

The only acceptable response to that commenter is to point them to the children’s book section.

Or just learn to use a dictionary?

just because Americans have become illiterate doesn't mean the rest of us need to be. they're getting mad at the wrong people.