semiliteracy

The name of his association reflected his view of the tiny punctuation mark as a “poor defenseless creature,” its very existence in danger as technology increasingly encouraged speed over grammatical precision and the English-speaking population sank, in the view of the most curmudgeonly sticklers, into a disgraceful form of semiliteracy.

But this disproves, rather than confirms, the charge of semiliteracy.

In Extraterritorial, he warns that a more current threat, "the drift and boredom of semiliteracy" �man's marriage of convenience to his words, threatens to crush the life out of all civilized languages.