There’s a renewed push under way in Nashville to make English the city’s “official language.” It immediately struck me that if this passes and is enforced evenhandedly - not just targeting anyone who looks Hispanic or is even darker of complexion - then Nashville State Community College had better start beefing up its staff. There’s going to be an awful lot of Tennessee rednecks signing up for remedial classes.

I’m not just picking on Nashville. I graduated from high school there. But I can’t get over how many people supposedly devoted to the purity and dominance of English, whether in Tennessee, Kentucky, California or Michigan, have an appallingly poor command of it themselves. It amuses me to hear someone emit a mangled stream barely recognizable as English, then climb into a car bearing a bumper sticker declaring “Speak English or get out!”

During my years waiting tables, my generally careful use of standard English often clashed with regional accents that were almost a foreign language - though those speakers, accustomed to their own speech, considered me to be the weirdo.

I especially remember one down-home Kentucky family that couldn’t make out a word I said. I could understand them, however; most of my family is from eastern Kentucky.

After one exchange of shrugs and grunts, as I walked away I heard the man say to his wife, “Ih muh’b whutslak t’be’n Fraysrsumpin!”

I understood that: “This must be what it’s like to be in France or something.”

Backwoods accents aside, English is not a “pure” language to start with. Latin mixed with tribal languages related to proto-German, that was half-swamped by an invasion of French, and the resultant mess was modified over many geographic and cultural separations. Shakespeare, writing in what’s widely regarded as the language’s most elegant period, is little more intelligible to today’s high school students than Chaucer’s 400-years-older work would have been to him.

And today’s English would probably baffle either of them. One reason for its survival and growth is English’s willingness to borrow from other languages - even Turkish, as is the case with “ombudsman.” Lots of businesses now have someone with that job title. Who feels threatened by that?

A mastery of the spoken word is inextricably linked to easy familiarity with written language. If a person can write well, they probably speak well, too, and vice versa. Given our years of elementary instruction in English, both should be the norm, especially considering what’s gone before.

William Harris did a careful study of Greek and Roman societies, examining archaeological and literary evidence, and concluded in his 1991 book “Ancient Literacy” that perhaps only 10 percent to 15 percent of people could really read, even during the glory days of Athens or at the height of the Roman Empire. In major cities under the best of circumstances, maybe two or three times that number could boast what Harris called “craftsman’s literacy,” the ability to recognize some basic words and maybe scratch out their names.

For most of human history, that achievement was enough to live a comparatively good life. Only in the last 200 years or so has the idea become universal that everyone should learn to read as a matter of course.

I wonder: Despite appearances, have we really come that far?

The United States claims a literacy rate of 99 percent, but according to the U.N. Development Program, we’ve stopped really counting. Along with 23 other highly developed countries, American literacy is just assumed to be near-universal. Meanwhile, 17 countries that actually do count claim higher literacy rates than ours. Maybe we’re on top, maybe we’re 18th, maybe we’re 41st - just above Tonga.

That official figure, however accurate it may be, is different from functional literacy. A 2002 U.S. government report found that more than one in five Americans couldn’t read well enough to really comprehend extensive written material - such as this newspaper. About 23 percent of people still aren’t much above the “craftsman’s literacy” that was relatively common 2,000 years ago.

Sure, 77 percent “real” literacy is far better than our ancestors could expect, but consider the difference in the amount of printed material between then and now. It’s impossible to walk down any street without spotting something to read, from discarded Reader’s Digests to billboards and road signs.

I wonder how long that dominance of written standard-English will last. Two trends are pushing back: LOLspeak, condensing words and phrases to a few letters on a cell phone screen; and video. Why write out a long sentence when a few letters and numbers will convey approximate meaning? Why read the book when you can watch the movie?

Some friends of mine told me of recently completing an introductory writing class at Western Kentucky University. They were worried that they were bad writers - until they exchanged papers with classmates. Whatever literary flaws their stories may have had were negated by the sheer unintelligibility of most others. Students expecting to get through college were incapable of constructing a coherent narrative, exploring a thought in logical detail, or rendering their ideas in anything approaching standard spelling.

That’s why everyone needs to be fully literate, regardless of the availability of crude alternatives. It’s a matter of precision and skill, which overflow into other abilities. I was never very good at diagramming sentences, but I’ve been able to write and speak properly as far back as I can remember - because I always read. I was accustomed to seeing proper sentences. Even if I couldn’t name the parts, I knew how they fit together.

With the ubiquity of easy high-tech alternatives, it becomes less likely that people will be really comfortable with writing regularly. We can expect to see the proportion of the fully literate dropping back toward Roman standards, replaced by larger numbers who can usually make out enough letters and numbers to guess which button they should push.

This isn’t just a matter of private embarrassment. For those who don’t know any better, it’s often on public display.

Just about every day I look at Engrish.com, which posts public submissions of bizarre and often hilarious signs from other countries rendered in amateur attempts at English. Those, while entertaining, are entirely excusable, just as we’d undoubtedly make some funny errors if we had to translate most public notices into Hindi. The average Kentuckian is not prepared to pick words out of an English-Hindi dictionary and string them together properly.

In preparation for hosting the Olympics, however, China made a determined effort to reduce its appearances on Engrish.com and similar outlets. The government hired native English-speakers to go around Beijing and fix poorly translated signs such as the one announcing “deformed man toilet” and the menu offering “strange juice.”

If the Chinese can do that, then surely we can do as well.

Look around town. I’ll just pick out one common error: the addition of an apostrophe due to the confusion of plural and possessive. When I see a sign advertising “Boat’s,” I first wonder if part of the sign fell off. Did this boat own something? Was it attached to something? No, it’s just the work of someone who doesn’t understand punctuation.

The scariest sign: “Tattoo’s.”

Should I ever get the urge for a tattoo, I’d think twice about going to that artist, however well that person might draw. I don’t want an error emblazoned on my body in permanent ink’s.

Jim Gaines is a Daily News reporter.