A bargain! Jared Kushner’s poppa had to give Harvard two and a half million dollars to get him in.
Maybe there’s a sliding scale.
Your personal definition is so broad as to loose all meaning. I have never heard ‘functional illiterate’ to mean ANY of things you have here.
Asked before… the difference between a man who can’t read and one who won’t read is… what, exactly?
The man who won’t read is still capable of reading.
A man who can’t read simply can’t read.
I have sympathy for someone who cannot read.
Right. But what’s the functional difference? (None, IMHO.) Any more than there’s a functional difference between someone who’s blind and someone who refuses to open their eyes.
A man who won’t read can be…persuaded.
I agree with you, that there is no functional difference, in either case, they are limited in their ability to understand the world around them.
My point is only that I would actually care about someone with a learning disability or some thing else beyond their control that prevents them from being able to read, while someone who is capable of reading, but chooses not to, has only my contempt.
In the case of trump, he has had ever opportunity to learn to read, so he either can read, and chooses not to, or chose never to learn, in which case I have only contempt.
Professionals define “functional illiteracy” as the inability to read and write sufficiently well to perform the routine everyday tasks of living and working. The term is a matter of ability, not willingness.
Did you do any reading up on the phrase “functional illiteracy”?[
](Functional illiteracy - Wikipedia)(bolding mine)
Probably. The point remains: is the intended student ready for such an elaborate task as “problem solving” or “accepting responsibility”? Teaching the proverbial aging canine to sing wastes your time and smears its lipstick. 
Are you claiming that English is a foreign language for Trump? Did you watch the video I linked to? Did you see that Trump was pausing now and then to make joking commentary about what he was saying? Could he do that if he didn’t understand what he was reading?
Of course. But that’s one step past the question. Since AO by his own admission and the observations of others does not read, the cause is almost irrelevant. I’m not likely to feel sorry for him in any way if he actually has dyslexia or whatever; he’s had a lifetime and ample wealth to overcome the problem, just as many motivated peons have without his advantages.
We can argue semantics and invent a new term if you like - “autoenabled illiteracy” work for you? - but I maintain the cause of AO’s nonreading is effectively irrelevant.
With practice, yes. And it’s not hard to stop and make a humorous remark that’s only vaguely associated with a topic; no one is going to, say, grade it on relevance and insight.
The point in this sub-sub-thread is that almost anyone can read a well-written speech, whether it’s from Demosthenes or JJ Abrams, and sound pretty impressive even if they have almost no idea what they’re saying. So the occasional foray into effective oratory for AO doesn’t mean much one way or the other given his usual incoherent, raving babble that invariably returns to WOW WE WON HUGELY DIDN’T WE!
Professional jargon often differs from commonplace language. (Why are racial and religious groups “suspect” groups when it comes to civil rights? What are they suspected of?)
People can be said to be functionally illiterate if they do not read, just as many people are indolent, even though they could exercise.
It seems to be a bit alien to him now and then.
Good grief.
No. Not remotely what I was saying.
Someone, anyone, just reading something out doesn’t prove anything about literacy.
OTOH, if someone is commenting on what they are reading, then that does say something. That’s a good point, but still with caveats. There were posts prior to mine that more or less just stopped at teleprompter reading.
The teleprompter reading issue was the only matter I was addressing.
Repeat: the only matter.
Any other matter you can think of was not relevant to the issue I was discussing. You want to talk about something beyond that, no need to quote my post.
Okay? Got that? Clear enough?
If you’re not trying to make an observation about the discussion being had, then what are you trying to say? Sure, someone reading a text can’t tell you whether that person understands what he’s reading if you know nothing at all about that person and you know nothing at all about the material being read. But that’s not the case here. We know the guy is a native English speaker and we know that the text is not some arcane jargon that your average English speaker might not understand.
So, in the case we are discussing in this thread the observation that “Being able to read a speech off a teleprompter means zip in terms of literacy, language comprehension, etc.” is flatly wrong.
I am not trying to split hairs over semantics. Two Many Cats posed a question about functional illiteracy without ever coming back to define it, so I am providing the definition used by people who deal with it professionally. If we want to talk about some characteristic other than functional illiteracy, fine with me, but let’s define what we’re talking about.
This is not a matter of professional jargon, it’s *the *definition. Disregarding a consensus definition is like Humpty Dumpty. There is no commonly accepted definition of functional illiteracy that means that some is perfectly capable of reading and simply chooses not to for laziness or lack of interest. If you want to talk about that characteristic, we need to call it something else.
Another famous one is Harry Anderson of Night Court fame. He’s pretty severely dyslexic and in an interview had described how he came to magic because the books had illustrations on how the tricks were done. He grew up an army brat and was able to do the same book report over and over again in different grades. He had his scripts read to him and memorized them and only admitted it as an adult when his wife called him out on it.
Yes people can give speeches, having been read them a few times, or reading them ahead of time a few times struggling through it, while being severely reading disabled.
Trump’s possible reading disability is not what concerns me about him.
I think one useful definition of functional illiteracy is the inability to obtain information from written material.
It’s a common form of test question; test-takers read a passage of written text and then answer questions to demonstrate they were able to obtain information from the text. I can imagine people who could “read” a text but not be able to retain the meaning of the text they read. The information wouldn’t transfer from the page to their mind. In such a case, being able to deliver a speech from a written text wouldn’t prove the point.