November 07, 2005

Reading: Orality and Literacy

The reading is titled Orality and Literacy. I'm not sure who it's by.

I've long had a pet theory that even the most mundane subject, if you really focus your mind on it, can, under that intense scrutiny, yield unexpected wonders. The corollary to this is that I do not get bored easily, because just by paying attention to whatever is around me, I can find some hook to latch my imagination onto.

Many of the readings for my ITP classes this year have, in some way or another, been good examples of the validity of this theory. I've read about interaction discussed at such an in-depth level that thoughts I'd never considered came flooding to the fore.

This reading is no different. Many would consider the evolution of writing (and the attendant struggle between orality and literacy) to be not much more than a history subject. As this reading shows, however, there's a lot more to it than that.

To begin with, though, you really need to think in a historical context to appreciate the monumental change writing afforded. In a world where words are evanescent, barely existing in the real world during the time taken to speak them, the ability to fix those words down and let them outlive their speaker, was very powerful.

Interestingly, many of the same arguments now leveled against advanced technological tools (i.e., cell phones, calculators, PDAs) were used to attack writing. Plato, for instance, thought that the use of written language would dilute people's ability to remember things because they could write them down.

The article continues on rather deeply into the way the alphabet created an existence for words that was at once linked closely to but also very dissimilar from the spoken word. The article mentions—and I recall being amazed at this when I was a young child—that when you reverse the letters of the word it can spell another word (e.g., "part" and "trap"), but when you reverse the sound of a word, it bears very little resemblance to either the forward- or backwards-written word. I think my own amazement at this fact might give a little insight into the way words were viewed by historic cultures that were just beginning to feel the effects of spreading literacy. I came to the realization slowly that the written word is a completely different object than its spoken equivalent.

The Middle English word "grammar" was originally used in a mystical sense, to convey the magical properties the written word could evoke. Our word glamour (which originally referred to the ability of something to cast a spell) comes from a Scottish variation of the word grammar. So Glamour Girls are really grammar girls. Keep that in mind when you're browsing the supermarket check-out aisle.

Posted November 7, 2005 09:10 PM. Categories: Week 9 | Permalink