Lately some “booktok” types have been baiting the ableists in the worst way, and I can’t blame them for biting.  Content warning if you come to my blog to avoid ableist language, observe…
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Says a poster on social media “Dear authors, Please use easy words in your books/fics – thank you  … Yours truly – reader.”  This includes a screen cap of them googling the word “scrying.”  In response on another site, a commenter says “I know we talk a lot about the literacy crisis and the horrible anti-intellectualism happening rn but I think we need to talk more about how much of an entitlement complex the stupidest among us have developed.”

Hey commenter managed to insult OP’s sanity and intelligence in the same response, while calling for a global increase in ableist shaming.  Pew pew.  I’m obliged by the rarity of the position I’ve taken to oppose this, but I can see where the commenter is coming from.  We’ve been living through increasingly frustrating times since we kicked off the millennium with the Misunderestimable Dub.  And if grammar and vocabulary were stripped of even modest complexity, would reading hold any appeal for the people who can handle that?  I don’t think so.

Might be fun to show an example of the improved world of literature OP is advocating:

Fortunato bugged me a lot.  I tried to stay calm, but when he insulted me, I promised I’d get revenge.  You know I didn’t tell him.  It had to be secret.  I was definitely gonna get revenge, but I couldn’t get caught.  If I was caught it wouldn’t count.  Same if he didn’t know I did it.

That’s repellent, but it occurred to me this still might be a good place to do a little disability activism.  I’ve said before, I think the average person is far less intelligent than our society expects them to be, and this doesn’t cause them to rise to expectations – it just causes them to live in shame and secrecy.  The original poster above seems to have missed out on the shame, but having gone out on this particular limb?  It’s bound to find them.

And maybe they have a point.  Classics like Cask of Amontillado do have simplified versions available for education, but why not just have simplified versions for people who lose enjoyment searching for definitions every other paragraph?  I know they’ve made that wildly easy on e-readers, but bear with me.  Should the reader have to be forced into an educational experience?

I know, you’re like, fuck that shit.  Look up the word.  Learn something.  After OP gets burned to ashes over this post, they will never forget what scrying means.  But still, what if there are a lot of people who just can’t retain the info of a vocabulary like yours or mine?  What if they feel insulted by trying to read a popular book and getting reminded one line after the next about their limitations?  Shouldn’t they be allowed to read a book that won’t make them feel bad about themselves?

And without limiting their options, right?  The argument you’re naturally going to make here is that the reader shouldn’t be reading anything more advanced than Dr. Seuss if they don’t want to learn about scrying.  But that’s precluding them from participating in society in a way that works for them, the same as saying wheelchair users should just deal with the shortage of accessible buildings in life.  The buildings where the cool kids go don’t have ramps, but if you are on wheels, you should know your place in the world.

What’s more, making easier to read versions of books is trivially easy.  Someone can just run that shit through an LLM and double check the results once, print, job’s a good ‘un.  What does it cost us to make any given book more accessible?  Not much.

The more complicated question that follows is this:  How should this be labeled?  The words you use matter a lot in disability activism.  Probably this reader doesn’t think of themself as disabled and would feel put upon to get the book “A Court of Thorns and Roses (Simple English).”  Single out the version for smart people?  She gets aCoTaR and you get aCoTaR (Advanced Readers)?

I don’t know.  There’s a tension between the need to accommodate and the need to not lower standards egregiously.  Cornish College of the Arts, in Seattle, is an interesting case study in what happens when you let standards go.  They had gotten good enough for accreditation right around 2010, and then immediately bent over backwards to make things easier for the slacker-ass rich kids their donors were shitting through the admissions process.  Eventually there were no classes in freshman year, just like, bag lunches and finger painting.  They went down in flames and their branding was bought by a christian university up the hill.  Nellie Cornish has some grave rolling to do.

But I’m inclined to be nice to people who aren’t smart, if they aren’t hurting anyone.  I’d accommodate ’em.

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