ABSTRACT
It is a piece of folk wisdom that part of what linguists do is define words. In over a decade as a linguist, however, no one, until now, has asked me to define a word. So my first try: What does “literacy” mean? It won’t surprise you that we have to define some other words first. So let me begin my giving a technical meaning to an old term which, unfortunately, already has a variety of other meanings. The term is “discourse.” I will use the word as a count term (“a discourse,” “discourses,” “many discourses”), not as a mass term (“discourse,” “much discourse”). By “a discourse” I will mean:
a socially accepted association among ways of using language, of thinking, and of acting that can be used to identify oneself as a member of a socially meaningful group or “social network.”
