You also try to make the point that having more knowledge than other people because you worked at it is not a privilege, which makes the assumption that everybody starts out with a level playing field, which is not true.

100 years ago, not everybody could read, not because they couldn’t learn, but many because it was believed they shouldn’t be taught.

You are making the assumption that since things are better now, then the world is fair now as well. This is not true.

Maybe 100 years from now, 100% of people who are ignorant on any given subject will be ignorant because they do not wish to work hard at knowing, That is not true of today anywhere in the world.

Being privileged means having/knowing something other people don’t have/know. Being privileged in this manner is not inherently bad. Finding fault in others because they do not possess something which you do, can be. (Bad. I mean, it can be bad).

But, I don’t see how you are adding to a conversation on grammar snobbing to a general audience by merely stating this and then defending your position.

It would make sense if you read this and felt it somehow described you and you needed to defend yourself.

Nobody is arguing that you didn’t work hard. Nobody is arguing that there aren’t people that have worked exceedingly hard to overcome real difficulties. However denying that you had a privileged start compared to many, just makes you come across as both arrogant and ignorant of the difficulties many people face.

Even people that have overcome sub-optimal learning conditions will have had some advantages along the way; a steady supply of food, a teacher or other person that took pity and decided to help out, no threat of violence, etc.

Yes, there are exceptional people. They are the exception, not the rule.

I’m going to judge the hell out of you, because you don’t seem to have enough self-awareness to avoid judging people who are less privileged than yourself.

And that’s just one argument.

I understood the value of an education because I saw what advanced degrees did for my parents, grandparents, and other relatives.

In other words, you were fortunate enough to grow up in a family that provided a positive learning environment that valued education. Well good for you.

Now kindly stop pretending you’d be just as well off if you’d been born to drug addicts on skid row.

Frank Lloyd Wright?

Now I know you’re just fucking with me. Wright was the son of a lawyer and a teacher, and you’re holding him up as an example of someone who made it completely on his own without any social or educational advantages whatsoever?

My point is not that highly successful people don’t work hard, it’s that being unsuccessful, or even illiterate, is not an indication that the subject in question is either lazy or entirely the master of their own fate.

Scots is a perfect example of a language which has pretty much been killed by the deliberate use of English as a bellwether of status.

Props go to the same upper-middle classes, those that loved the Act of Union, for ensuring that all our compulsory education was in Queen’s English and that ‘yi’d be battered and call’t a teuchter fir spikin’ in a sleekit halftongue nir any tutor’ and for timing the introduction of that change with the highland clearances, which swept up and discarded demographics, families too, with callous abandon.

As late as the nineties, attempts to recognise Gaelic or Scots were quashed since, ‘the Scottish Office has generally contended that this is unnecessary as there has never been specific legal discrimination against the languages like there has been against Welsh in the 1536 Act of Incorporation.’

There has been progress since then, but many of us, like practically everyone north of Watford, codeswitch depending on the people we’re talking to.

Did you go to school hungry? Get beaten or sexually abused at home? Did you fear being shot or beaten while walking to school? Have to do homework in an unheated apartment designed for 4 people but housing 12?

I didn’t have these troubles and I’m ‘educated’ enough to realize it and know that others do. Maybe you guys haven’t bettered yourselves as much as you think.

Trust me I worked hard in school. I went beyond what was required, I read my older sister’s text books, I went to the library and read random subjects, and I still do today.

You fail to give credit where is it due. Some people (myself included) worked hard to get where we are today.

an exact command,—

Larded with many several sorts of reasons,
Importing Denmark’s health, and England’s too,
With, ho! such bugs and goblins in my life,—
That, on the supervise, no leisure bated,
No, not to stay the grinding of the axe,
My head should be struck off.

It’s not just a text from Claudius to Engliand, “Sup bro, kill 2 dumbfucks 4 me kthanxbai”: Hamlet’s forced to ape Claudius’s orotund message and its stylistic prolixity–including all the toasts to the king’s health–in order that the message seem convincingly Claudius’s. He’s not just talking about imitating the scribe’s pretty handwriting: he’s talking about composing, on the spot, a suitably kingly message to another royal.
I get your point about yeoman not writing well, but that’s my point too: Hamlet thinks folks who write well and write pretty are so many serfs. He has a general disdain for language, too, as do so many who use it well: cf. his “unpack my heart with words,” where this time his referent is a prostitute, i.e., those who speak volubly and at length are hos. Man, talk about literacy privilege issues! 

http://nces.ed.gov/naal/lit_history.asp

You’re welcome, by the way.

Focusing on the familiar, here in the US we have public libraries, free literacy programs, and public internet access. Unless you have a learning disability, there is nothing to prevent you from educating yourself and mastering your native tongue. 

Blaming the world or your place in it for a lack of effort on your part is laughable. You don’t wait for family or community to provide you with a supportive learning environment. To wit, I submit Booker T Washington. Born into slavery, he worked in the salt furnaces and mines until he had saved enough wages to pay his own way to the Hampton Institute were he continued to work to pay for his education. He then parlayed his hard work and dedication towards his own education which eventually lead to a career in education.