What do we mean by literacy?

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Literacy is an umbrella term. But as broad as it may be, this very breadth seems to run counter to the needs for specificity and objectivity that being literate demands (Perry, 2012). An analogy may therefore serve us effectively in drawing depth from something that seems too broad (McDaniel & Donnelly, 1996). My stroke of insight came after I reread in Wolf (2007, p. 16) that “[the associative dimension] is part of the generative quality at the heart of reading.” What then could be more generative in terms of analogous concepts than the generation of life itself? If reading and writing are historically considered the core ideas for literacy (Elmborg, 2012) than pregnancy and delivery could equate to the apprenticeship stage and the final coming of age in whatever modality of literacy one might choose – or be forced - to invest. 
If bearing a baby is hard for some, as becoming literate may indeed be, for others it seems to be a constant state of blessing, as we often see in some children who go by stages of literacy in leaps and bounds. And once the child comes into this world, a world that is yet novel and that varies among different contexts, much the same way as being literate varies across content areas and cultures, the doing cannot be undone, i.e., there is no going back to the stage of pre-literacy as there is no return to the protection of the womb. And the way in which this baby will grow and the stimuli it will receive will much depend on the values and the disposition of those surrounding it. The same seems to hold true once the cogs and wheels of literacy, in whatever genre one might look into, begin to roll. Whether it is with a critical disposition, a la Freire as conveyed by Perry (2012) or by taking the multiliteracies rainbowlike perspectives into account, the demands and choices of the environment one is in shapes and reinforces the choices made for that kind of literacy development.
There is an African popular belief that can be read in Clément (1997) wherein the word is believed to act and not just to transmit a message. It is believed to recreate the world and to recreate ourselves at every use to the point of generating the idea that “to be naked is to be wordless.” (Clément, p. 514). This resonates with the hypotheses brought by Wolf (2007) that “the world of letters may have begun as an envelope to the world of numbers.” (p. 27). Could the analogy of possessing a physical body to act and ‘be’ someone as equating to becoming literate or enveloping oneself in a world of literacies become even stronger at a time that is continuously demanding different levels of literacy from our newcomers?
In here I also see a connection with the limitation imposed by what words can name, much in the way that Wittgenstein had once conceptualized his/our knowledge about the world (Wittgenstein, 2013). That has happened because in widely spread languages like Spanish, as much as in Portuguese (my mother language), literacy is easily confounded with the most common and widely spread term 'alfabetismo'. Nowadays, with the coming of age and acknowledgement that knowing to read and write, i.e. knowing the alphabet hence where the name comes from, cannot be reduced by the limits of language, a broader term has surfaced and is in current use for most of Latin American countries - 'letramento/letramiento' (de Andrade & Barreto, 2012 for a clear example of this usage) - a term that has been clearly borrowed from 'literacy'. This latter term has been adopted as a 'catch-all' denomination that is bursting with too heavy a burden. And when something gets overused, it ends up by being misused. 
The problem that I see with the current use of the term literacy is that it is becoming a misnomer, a term that is being used to define too much and ends up by meaning almost nothing at all. If we don't start by qualifying what kind of literacy is being referred to or in what situation the name is being used, the next step, that is, the how it is going to be developed and what assessments will be used to determine the outcomes will be far removed from the desired result.
Sometimes inadequacy equates illiteracy as when it means that a certain individual - because of his (low) proficiency in a target language - comes across as not knowledgeable in an area of expertise. This false notion of illiteracy springs from a lack of adequate linguistic knowledge. Taking this hypothetical situation in mind,  it seems to me that we would do well in considering the role that development has in relation to literacy.  When we talk about development, we can easily misname what should be better referred to as linguistic development to cover other areas of development, like physical, emotional or cognitive. Besides the lack of a proper reference to what kind of development we may be referring to, we have also to consider that we need to appreciate the role that experience plays. Prior and actual experience, brings a heavy weight to the kind of literacy one wants to develop. And to add another layer to that, experience does not dictate achievement as it is deliberate practice  that is needed to move on to full attainment (Ericsson, Krampe & Tesch-Romer, 1993).
Therefore, the role of metaliteracy, a term that adequately encompasses the degree of knowledge, reflection and transferring across multiple domains of literacy, can be  called into this discussion. Once taken together with measurements and deliberate practice, we can begin to define, shape and consider each type of literacy in a new framework. A framework that elevates the constructs, abilities, roles and genres pertaining to each type of literacy, such as literacy in reading and writing, but that remains accessible to a multipurpose analysis in relation to sibling types, like numeracy, visual literacy or even research literacy.
This discussion is far from over. Stay tuned for upcoming posts on this topic. 

References

Clément, C. (1997). Le Voyage de Theo. Paris : Éd. du Seuil, 1997.
de Andrade, S. B., & Barreto, J. P. S. (2012). Letramiento digital y el conocimiento: Conflictos y desafíos en la construcción de un medio de educación en la era de Internet. In III European Conference on Information Technology in Education and Society: A Critical Insight (pp. 272-273).
Ericsson, K. A., Krampe, R. T., & Tesch-Römer, C. (1993). The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance. Psychological review, 100(3), 363.
Elmborg, J. (2012). Critical information literacy: Definitions and challenges. In C. W. Wilkinson & C. Bruch (Eds.), Transforming information literacy programs: Intersecting frontiers of self, library culture, and campus community (pp. 75–95). Chicago, IL: Association of College and Research Libraries. Retrieved from http://ir.uiowa.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1013&context=slis_pubs
McDaniel, M. A., & Donnelly, C. M. (1996). Learning with analogy and elaborative interrogation. Journal of Educational Psychology, 88(3), 508.
Perry, K. H. (2012). What is literacy? A critical overview of sociocultural perspectives. Journal of Language & Literacy Education, 8(1), 50–71. Retrieved from http://jolle.coe.uga.edu/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/What-is-Literacy_KPerry.pdf
Wittgenstein, L. (2013). Tractatus logico-philosophicus. Routledge.
Wolf, M. (2007). Proust and the squid: The story and science of the reading brain. New York, NY: Harper Collins.