Comments by "John Berry" (@user-ud6ui7zt3r) on "I took a real Jim Crow literacy test: here's what happened" video.

  1. I love the… Spell backwards, forwards. …question. It could mean… • spell the word forwards with the letters sequenced in reverse; OR • spell the word backwards with the letters sequenced non-reversed. Depending upon which interpretation you go with, the answer might be… • sdrawrof ; OR • backwards .
    3
  2. Today, illiteracy is rampant, even among so-called Educated People. Just last week, at my workplace, I discovered two instances. In one instance, the young white individual was the proud graduate of some Polytechnic school in California. However, in the course of conversation, he was instructed to locate the edge of a piece of tape at the tangent of two mating surfaces. With a dead-serious expression, he replied… ”What’s a tangent ?” In another instance, which happened during the same week, I was dealing with a young white individual who revealed that he had once won 2nd Place in a high school Science Fair competition. When I asked this coworker where his boss was, he replied that his boss was with his young son at the hospital. It seems his son suddenly fell ill, and they had to rush him to the emergency room. The boss texted the diagnosis to my young coworker, but my coworker COULDN’T READ THE WORD. So he showed me the text, and asked me if I could read the word. Do you know what the word was? The word was APPENDICITIS. Can you imagine there exists a high school graduate, who won 2nd Place in a science contest, but cannot read the word appendicitis ?
    1
  3. In a true southern exam, the directions would include the terminology ’catty wampus’.
    1