The inadequacy of native English (particularly Americans) becomes painfully obvious when one reads a Joseph Conrad or Vladimir Nabokov. It is a credit to their brilliance, but it is also a commentary on English writers. One contributing factor to the decline of written English is all this wonderful technology we have. The phone started the trend; we no longer have to write letters. Television and cinema continued the trend reducing the amount reading. The Internet is the nasty culprit currently. Email--what seemed like a return to written communication--turned out to amplify the laziness of spoken language. Very few people pay attention to punctuation, capitalization, or spelling, let alone more advanced grammatical concerns in their emails. Most charge through the writing of an email and shoot it off as quickly as possible. Is it really too difficult to use spell check? The current American educational system, of which I am a part, is also to blame. That's whole other can of worms which is probably not appropriate for zorn-list. I commend the zorn-list for producing some of the most literate emails that I've seen. I apologize for any ungrammatical emails I send out in my haste. Could it be said that the advent of recorded music reduced musical literacy? Learning to play tunes on the piano (or other instrument) used to be one of the only ways to hear music in the home in the past. It seems incredible to my modern sensibilities that Scott Joplin livelihood was based on royalties from sheet music. Furthermore, fewer people have musicians for their special occasions. Working banquets at a country club, I saw many more DJs than live bands. Zach