|
| People generally can not tell you where the names for the
| days of the week came from, the time it takes for light to
| travel from the sun to the Earth, the location of Austria,
| the date (within 20 years) of the Civil War, the name of the
| secretary of state... All of these are illiteracy, but not
| innumeracy. How many can name the composer of La Boheme? Or
| where did Dante put Lucifer? What colors are a Monarch
| butterfly? Or how about the sign "Ye olde coffe shop", how
| was it pronounced in old English? "The olde coffe shop",
| because the Y was originally a thorn, with a dot over the y,
| which was an old English letter pronounced th.
Personally I'd classify most of the examples above as examples of
"ignorance" not of "illiteracy". As in, person X is ignorant of the
location of Austria; they aren't illiterate of the location.
(Admittedly the term literate is often used as a neologism to mean
knowledgeable.)