The comedian George Carlin, bless his soul, used to have a wonderful spiel about freeway drivers.

Paraphrasing: “Anyone who goes faster than me–what a maniac! Anyway who goes slower–what a moron.”

I’m totally stealing that for today’s discussion about cultural literacy.

I live on an island, ok? So I am not only isolated from popular culture, I am LITERALLY INSULATED. (Insula = island in Latin. Yup.) Here on my little isle, we call trips to the mainland “going to America.” I’ve already found myself resisting such trips.

And I’ve only lived here full-time for three years!

Along with my new home, I have a new job that has almost nothing to do with teenagers–unlike the last 20 years of teaching, where I was marinated in surrounded by them. So you can see how I’ve begun to lose just a teensy bit of my once-awesome cultural literacy.

Recently my blog guru teacher, Kristen Lamb, posted this wonderful bit on her blog: http://warriorwriters.wordpress.com/2013/07/18/what-sharknado-can-teach-us-about-writing/

It’s a great post, as you now know since you read it. But when I did, the whole time I was thinking, “Sharknado??? Oh man, where have I been?”

And here I thought I was all hip because I kinda/sorta know who the Kardashians are.

Anyone else out there feel like the world of what-you-have-to-know-about-to-avoid- being-a-fossil is expanding at light speed?

Then a local (meaning island) friend of mine (who’s not all that much older) rescued me from my self-pity pit. Responding to an email I’d sent, he asked, “Yeah, what does [colon + parenthesis] mean, anyway? My niece writes that all the time.”

🙂 🙂 :)!!!! Hurray–someone less literate than I am! I got to teach him all about emoticons. And no, I did not call him a moron–any more than I’d call Kristen Lamb a maniac. 🙂

I told my friend I’d try not to sound too smug when telling this story. Then I quoted Yoda’s dictum: “Do or do not. There is no try.” Then I asked him if he knew who Yoda was.

He did. Definitely not a moron! But probably still wondering, as I am, how insulated fossils like us are possibly going to keep up. Maybe I’ll assign myself an hour of YouTube a day.

So how about y’all? What examples have you run into of folks who are hopelessly moronic less hip than you are? Or your own lack of hipness? Or are you the maniac on the highway of cultural literacy? Let us hear!

(Original photo courtesy Hexmar, WANA Creative Commons)