Dumb, Dumbing, Dumbed

Above is a graph from an interesting study on the changing use of language by congressfolk.

...[referring to] the 20 members of Congress with the lowest grade level score for their Congressional record corpus dating back to 1996. Of them, 85% (17 of 20) are Republicans; 65% (13/20) are freshmen, and another 15% (3/20) are sophomores. Additionally, 90% (18/20) are House members. The two Senators to make the bottom 20 are Rand Paul (R-KY) and Ron Johnson (R-WI), both Tea Party-supported freshmen.

In fairness:

Republicans also outnumber Democrats among the members who speak at the highest grade levels. Among the top 20, 12 are Republicans, 7 are Democrats, and one (Joe Lieberman) is an Independent. And eight of the top ten are Republicans. There are also 14 House members and six Senators. And perhaps most notably, there are only two freshmen and three sophomores. More than half of the members have been in their seat for at least 15 years, which is well above the median of nine years across all members of the 112^th Congress.

I'd say what it shows is not entirely clear: are the newly elected teabaggers dumber than average or are they smart enough to realize that the people who elected them are?* Or is it something else? It's a finding that fits nicely with certain preconceptions, but which really can't be explained by the data provided. Nor do the authors of the study try to -- although they do speculate that speeches nowadays are designed for YouTube as opposed to when they were actually intended to persuade colleagues on complex issues. (And, as charts are wont to do, the differences look worse graphically than they are, maybe: it's only a grade level difference. But who knows? It might even be worse than it looks: I'm guessing grade levels aint' what they used to was, either.)

Some might argue that it just reflects an attempt to reach a larger audience, which, in a democracy, is a good thing. I'd offer, though, that it's decidedly NOT a good thing if the best way to reach today's voters is to talk down and avoid using big words.

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* I lean toward first-order dumbness. Witness the comments by a freshman teabaggR from Florida with the ironic name of Daniel Webster, regarding defunding the American Community Survey, which the R House voted to do, despite its value on many levels for the past 150 years or more: it's not scientific, he said. It's random. (For any teabaggers reading this: it's precisely the randomness that makes it scientific.) Shows you the profound effects forward to which we can look, as teabaggRs do everything they can to diminish science and ruin public education. People making decisions for us, dumber than a sack of teabags.