Important Thoughts From Ong

"The orality treated here is primary orality, that of persons totally unfamiliar with writing." p. 6


"The basic orality of language is permanent." p. 7


"A grapholect is a transdialectal language formed by deep commitment to writing." p. 8


"Oral expression can exist and mostly has existed without any writing at all, writing never without orality." p. 8


"As noted above, I style the orality of a culture totally untouched by any knowledge of writing or print, 'primary orality'. It is 'primary' by contrast with the 'secondary orality' of present-day high-technology culture, in shich a new orality is sustained by telephone, radio, television, and other electroinc devices that depend for their existence and functioning on writing and print." p. 11

Gossip!!!

Wheelless Automobile

"Thinking of oral tradition or a heritage of oral performance, genres and styles as 'oral literatre' is rather like thinking of horses as automobiles without wheels. You can, of course, undertake to do this. Imagine writing a treatise on horses (for people who have seen a horse) which starts with the concept not of horse but of 'automobile' built on the readers' direct experience of automobiles. It proceeds to discourse on horses by always referring to them as 'wheelless automobiles', explaining to highly autmobilized readers who have never seen a horse all the points of difference in an effort to excise all idea of 'automobile' out of the concept 'wheelless automobile' so as to invest the term with a purely equine meaning. Instead of wheels, the wheelless automobiles have enlarged toenails called hooves; instead of headlights or perhaps rear-vision mirrors, eyes; instead of a coat of lacquer, something called hair; instead of gasoline for fuel, hay, and so on. In the end horses are only what they are not." p. 12

Kane

"No longer constrained by the checks and balances of survival in nature, populations are now controlled by social class. A class system arises out of the necessitites of agriculture. For agriculture to work, you need to have a concept of property. For a concept of property to work, you need to have a state. For a state to work, you need to have armies to defend it. Consequently, developed agricultural societies evolve a new mythology featuring three classes of deities-deities who stand respectively for the functions of priest, farmer, and warrior." The Art of Memory p. 21-22