We worry a lot about illiteracy, but nobody worries about antiliteracy. There are forces afoot that, by hap or by design, debase reading and make people less likely to engage in it. These forces treat written words as objects devoid of meaning.

Newspapers are big offenders. Words are things that fill column-inches. If there are too many, remove some. If there are too few, write some more. What actual words survive is of less moment. The decline of proofreading is proof of this proposition. With the advent of computer programs that detect most typographical errors, newspapers decided that they didn't need people to read through the text for mistakes, and many of them have dispensed with this function.

As the editors know and have always known, Spellcheck and its friends can only reveal typographical errors that show up as nonsense, in the form of letter arrangements that are not words. These programs don't alert you when you substitute "then" for "they" or "is" for "it" or "the Simpson's" for "the Simpsons." As for grammatical and syntactical errors, they will always get through. No matter. Close enough.

And usually, it is. But occasionally the reader has to stop and guess what the writer meant because of what could be a typo. Too often, the meaning is impossible to distinguish. This should be of concern to editors, but it isn't, because words are just objects to them.

Most editors seem to believe, perhaps with some justification, that their subscribers are really interested in the pictures (which seem to grow bigger, more colorful, and more numerous with every passing year) and are not reading the words anyway. As for the few who do try to extract meaning out of the printed words, there just aren't enough of them to justify a painstaking proofreading of every word of every issue. It's a blatant expression of contempt for readers and for reading. Positively antiliterate.

As bad as newspapers are, television's even worse. Try to read the credits following any network television program. You can't read the names. Want to find out who played Mrs. Micawber on "Masterpiece Theater?" Who wrote that great "60 Minutes" segment? Who wrote the song Kermit sang on today's "Sesame Street?" Forget about it. The words go by so quickly, even the fastest readers can't digest them.

Obviously television credits aren't meant to be read. So what the hell are they there for? Ornamentation? Tradition? Contractual obligation? We understand why disclaimers are printed in microscopic letters: so you won't notice them. But this is small print writ large.

We presume somebody--at least the people whose names are mentioned--wants us to read the credits, but, alas, it is not to be. When credits roll, my eyes roll right along with them. As a reader, I experience them as an act of hostility, not just against me, but against reading.

Our language has taken a terrible beating at the hands of antiliterates. Take the current popular usage of the word "word." I got a big laugh at my kitchen table one dinner-time from my then 17-year-old when I punctuated something she said by uttering, "Word." Apparently, I had used it inappropriately. When she stopped laughing I asked her what the sentence "Word." means exactly. She couldn't come up with anything except that it is supposed to be an affirmation of some kind. The true meaning of the term is all but ineffable.

In what must be an intentional act of irony, young people have come to employ "word" to denote precisely nothing. Standing alone as a sentence or question, its meaning depends entirely on context and is invariably imprecise and ambiguous. "Word" is a little joke, really. The joke's on us, of course. In accepting antiliteracy without complaint, we betray a careless stewardship of language, as our kids seem to be trying to tell us.