Cultural literacy is the way in which we use various aspects of our culture in our literature. There may be famous lines from movies, such as "here's looking at you, Kid", historical events like Pearl Harbor as "a day that will live in infamy", or to current pop culture references such as "googling" or "facebook me". In order to be literate, we need to not only know how to read and write, but also be able to understand the world around us and how our culture affects what we read and write about.
Professor E.D. Hirsch wrote the book The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy: What Every American needs to know, in which he wrote that cultural literacy is "a deep understanding of mainstream culture, which no longer has much to do with white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, but with the imperatives of industrial civilization. It is the need for cultural literacy, a profound conception of the whole civilization".
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