The Place of the Spoken Word in the Information Age

I've started the School Library Media program at the University of Georgia with the aim of becoming a Media Specialist. One of the classes I am taking this semester is on technology and relies heavily on online discussion and short written assignments.

In an assignment I am working on I found myself thinking about Ong's claim that people from literate cultures think differently than people from primary oral cultures. I began to realize that, in all likelihood, the Internet (and all that comes with it) is rewiring our minds again. Knowing that we can get information instantly. Knowing that we can disseminate information instantly. Connecting with people anywhere in the world with video conferencing. These things change the way we communicate and the way we solve problems.

Writing provides us with external storage space. We don't have to keep all of our thoughts and computations in our brain. The paper is an extension of our brain. Now the Internet is one big brain extension shared by the world. When the external component of our brain has changed so drastically, the brains inside our heads must be changing to keep up.

Then the question becomes, if our brains are actually changing to better interface with advanced information technology, where does the spoken word fit in? Is there still a place for face to face conversations and live performances in the information age?

The goal of this post is to pose the question, not to answer it. I would like to do some more investigations, but I suspect I will be answering this question for the rest of my professional life. I believe the spoken word does have a place - not just because I want to, but because I still witness it's power on a daily basis. But there is no doubt that, like so many things, how the spoken word serves us today is changing and will continue to change.

Who is Listening?

In the flurry of personal life I have been a little lax about my blogging. But at least one of my personal distractions may have something to teach us about sound and sense.

I am pregnant!

Obviously I am filled with all kinds of feelings about being a mother and my identity in general. And I strive to fully comprehend what my body and my baby are going through by paying close attention to everything I can sense. My pregnancy calendar tells me that my baby can sense me, too! About midway through pregnancy the baby can hear the mother's heart, stomach, and her voice.

I have become very aware of how I use my voice and what my tone conveys. When I yell at my cats (sometimes they deserve it) I feel a little bad. But when I sing while I am doing chores, I imagine that I am bonding with my baby. I am telling it something about myself.

Sometimes it's not about what you are saying, it's about how you say it. And sometimes the only way to say something is out loud.

Things That Aren't There

I have been thinking about how words can be more meaningful than the things they describe.

The human mind has some clever little things called "memory" and "imagination." Because of this we think about things that are either not in existence any more or possibly don't exist at all. Now maybe this is a "tree falls in the forest" question, but do those ideas even exist if we can't talk about them? Maybe or maybe not, but certainly the ideas take off and gain corporeality through discussion.

Think of a person you have lost. That person has a name, a word used to describe him. You can still talk about that person by name, remember your time together, and in many ways, keep him with you through shared memories. The person the name belongs to no longer exists, but the name continues to mean everything it did when the person was alive. The word is now more real than the thing it describes.

Now think of God. Some would say God is imagined. Whether He is isn't really important to this discussion. What is important is that what exactly God means is up for debate. The fact that we have a name for God allows that debate to take place. The fact that we can talk about God makes most religions what they are. Do you see how essential it is to have a word for something if we are to make it a part of our lives?

For the word to truly come to life, to create meaning, must it be spoken? Consider my examples. Remembering a lost friend is an activity normally done out loud. And although there are many persuasive religious texts, religion is also a very verbal activity.

Southwold

I recently visited Southwold, UK, which is the namesake of Southold, NY. You may notice that although one place is named for the other, the names are spelled differently.

Southwold seemingly takes its name from geography. A "wold" is a collection of hills over a chalk base and Southwold is in the southern part of East Anglia.

Southold, NY is neither located in a wold nor in a particularly southerly location.

It is likely that the spelling of the name changed because "Southold" is easier to say that "Southwold." Additionally, the geographical position described by "Southwold" is meaningless in "Southold" so there is no longer any need to strictly stick to that spelling.

The literal meaning of "Southwold" may be "a southern wold" but to the people who moved to New York it clearly meant something more. It meant "home." So they created a home away from home. They didn't move to another "southern wold" but they did move to Southold.

The sound has become the sense. The word has evolved to mean something other than what it originally meant and so spelling it the way it sounds becomes more important than spelling it in a way that illuminates the meaning.

Saying it Makes it True

There are a group of jokes and urban legends that get passed around that center on the concept of "vagina infinita."

Exemplum gratia:

A man gets lost in a vagina and is wandering around for days when he finally runs into another man. He asks, "Hey, do you know the way out of here?"
The other man answers, "Not exactly, but if you help me look for my car keys we should be able to drive out."

The lead cheerleader acrobatically makes her way to the top of the human pyramid and once she is up there the class rings of the entire football team fall out of her skirt.

Now, it's bad enough that men tell these stories, thereby perpetuating the belief that the vagina is a mysterious and frightening place, but even worse, some women are starting to buy into this mindset, as well. They don't tell the stories the same way, but they have the same message:

My friend knows this girl who had sex with a tampon in and then afterwords she couldn't find the tampon.

Women, seeing as how they possess the equipment, should know better. What is it that lends these stories enough credibility that women start to be suspicious of their own bodies? I think it is that they are primarily passed around by word of mouth.

It is true that urban legends and jokes are widely circulated on the internet. However, they are usually outside the context of a conversation. People send e-mails that consist only of jokes or have only "this story that you need to read because it could happen to you!" I don't know about you, but when I get an e-mail like this the first thing I do is check it out on snopes. These e-mails are also easy to disbelieve because they often aren't very personal. A friend has forwarded the story to you and 100 of her other closest friends after receiving it from someone else who also forwarded it to 100 people.

But, when you are having a private conversation with a girlfriend and she says, "listen to what happened to a friend of mine..." Or maybe you're even talking to a guy friend who says, "you won't believe what happened to my buddy who dated a cheerleader..." You don't automatically go into skeptic mode. Talking to another person is more intimate than e-mailing them and it is this intimacy that makes what you say more believable. And regardless of what might be scientifically accurate, if you believe a story, in some ways it becomes true. When you treat your body like it is something beyond understanding, you won't understand it.

Sesquipedalian

A sesquipedalian is a big word. The name literally means "a foot and a half in length."

What is interesting about the term "sesquipedalian" is that "a foot and a half" is a measure of physical length. Only the written word has physical length. You can put down a ruler and measure how much space a word takes up on the page. In fact, some college students agonize over such things when trying to meet a page limit.

The spoken word has temporal length - the amount of time it takes to say it. Often, temporal length and physical length correspond, but not always. For instance, the word "I" and the word "flight" both have only one syllable, so they should take about the same about of time to say. But "flight" has five more letters than "I" and takes up almost five times as much space.

The use of "big words" is often thought of as overly formal or even pretentious. What do people have against "big words"? I don't think it is their size that actually offends, but rather the fact that they aren't frequently used and not everyone knows what they mean. The words are referred to as "big" because most of them are that, too.

What is the connection between the length of a word and how widely it is used and understood? At this point, I'm not entirely sure. I know that in the English language the majority of words that are commonly used are Germanic in origin, and a lot of the words that people think of as "big" come from Latin. Because Latin is an inflected language, words don't have to start out big to end up big. And to make matters worse, sometimes the words just sort of expand as they are making their way into English. For example, the Latin word "pulcher" is an adjective meaning "beautiful." But on it's way into English it has been turned into a noun, "pulchritude," (meaning "beauty") and then back into an adjective to give us "pulchritudinous" (meaning "beautiful.") That's twice as many letters to say the same thing (and it takes almost twice as long to say).

So far we know that "big words" are words that a lot of people don't know the meaning of and many of them also happen to be long. We know that the length of a written word is not exactly the same as the length of a spoken word (in quality and sometimes quantity). Does speaking a "big word" aloud shed any light on its meaning?

I'll tell you this: When I am reading and come across a long word I don't know, I tend to skip over it. My brain says "does not compute" and doesn't waste any time on it. But if I am talking to someone and she uses a long word I've never heard before, even if I don't understand it, I may at least enjoy the way it sounds.

Telephone

I was talking to my sister on the phone last night. During the middle of one of my sentences she started laughing. But I wasn't saying anything I would expect her to laugh at, so I was a little put off. I thought maybe she was laughing at something she was looking at or heard unrelated to me. But I wanted to know what it was. "Why were you laughing?" I asked her. She didn't respond right away which put me off even more. Finally we realized there was a time delay.

I have already mentioned that timing is an important element of speech and can aid in understanding. Clearly, bad timing can also hinder understanding. But is talking on the phone really a good illustration of the spoken word in action?

Nope. Telephone conversations are an example of what Ong calls "secondary orality." The progression of written communication opens up new opportunities for spoken communication as well. Talking on the telephone is possible because of writing.

And it is different from talking to someone in person, as my example demonstrates. Talking face to face isn't just about the words coming out of your mouth. It is also about facial expressions and gestures. It is about being in the same spacial and temporal context.

When you talk on the phone you can't see what the other person is doing. You aren't looking at the same things. And, if there is a problem with your connection, the person you are talking to might not hear what you say right when you say it.

Air Quotes

In his book Orality and Literacy Walter Ong talks about how living in a literate society changes the way that you think and speak. Just knowing that writing is possible forces you to put your thoughts together in a different way. So, even when speech is totally detached from the written word, it is still influenced by writing. (Although I am a huge fan of Ong, I don't have the book on me currently. Apologies for not including a proper quotation or page numbers.)

There are many ways that writing can influence speech, but one that quickly comes to mind for me is the use of air quotes. Quotation marks exist on the page and came about after the invention of writing. So what are they doing in our speech?

Most punctuation marks are meant to describe things about the sentance that would be apparent if it were spoken rather than written down. For example, the comma indicates a pause. In speech a pause is necessary to help distinguish clauses. When you are reading you do not actually have to pause, becuase you see the comma, and understand that there is some kind of seperation between what comes before and what comes after.

Exclamation points indicate excitement. Without them it would be difficult to differentiate an excited phrase from a calm one. When someone is speaking they show excitement in their tone of voice. A question mark is very similar in that it clarifies what a sentence on the page is doing. But when a question is spoken aloud you understand it is a question because of how the speaker says it.

There is more to speech than the way words sound. There are all sorts of aspects to speech, such as timing and tone, that help the listener ascertain meaning. The use of punctuation attempts to tackle these aspects.

But I don't think quotation marks work quite the same way. I think if you wrote the way people speak, or the way people used to speak before writing existed, you wouldn't need quotation marks. Quotation marks don't illustrate something people naturally do when they speak, they have deveolped with the complex dialog that only exists in literate stories. Since they aren't from the speaking relm, when we speak the way we write we sometimes need to show that quotation marks are there. So we use our hands.

HTML

In the process of creating a personal website, I have been learning HTML (hypertext markup language). I started wondering how languages like HTML fit into the sound and sense discussion. After all, this is a language that is not spoken. In fact, it isn't even meant to be read by people. It is a language solely for communicating with computers, to make them display what is meant to be read by people.

Remember that in phonetic languages the written version of a word describes the spoken version of the word. HTML describes the written version of a word. So, a document that is coded for the web is even further removed from meaning than a document that is written on a piece of paper. Don't believe me? Take a look at the source code for this page. Unless you do some coding yourself it's pretty scary looking. (Still scares me.) And even if you understand what it means and you see that a certain word is supposed to be displayed with italics, you aren't actually seeing it in italics. Just like you can read a word in italics and know that it is spoken with emphasis, but can't actually hear it.

Is this enough to declare a trend? The invention of writing allowed people to communicate over longer distances, preserve thought, and be more creative. The invention of the internet has allowed people to communicate with almost anyone on the planet, instantly publish their every thought, and be even more creative. But in each case, the code used gets a little further away from the things that are actually being said. The more sophisticated a method of communication is, the less it has to do with meaning.

Practical Storytelling

On the one hand, story-telling is a pastime or a form of social intercourse, associated with leisure, gregariousness, and travel. On the other hand, it may have a practical application, enforcing a point and enlivening a discourse with a parable or example. Because wit and humor add an extra seasoning to the sauce of narrative, the humorous anecdote has always been effective for the purposes of homiletic or forensic illustration, as demonstrated by the popularity of collections of stories and jokes for speakers. Thus the medieval Latin collections of exempla, or illustrative stories for use in sermons, which drew upon the storehouses of classical legend, fable and merry tales, served as a link between the folk literatures of ancient and modern times as a forerunner of the jest-book. (from A Treasury of American Folklore edited by B. A. Botkin, page 407)

Anecdotes and jokes make up an important part of the folklore for any culture. When most people hear the word 'folklore' they probably think 'folktales.' They think of Johnny Appleseed or Brer Rabbit; characters with full length stories attached to them. Anecdotes and jokes are different in format from folktales and it is because they serve a different purpose.

Botkin describes this purpose as illustrating a point. Anecdotes and jokes are not meant to be used alone, but woven into a larger argument. For example, if I am making the argument that jokes are funnier when told aloud, I might illustrate my point with this joke:

'Ask me what the secret to comedy is.'
'What's the secret to...'
'Timing. '

My argument would conclude: part of what makes a joke (or anecdote) effective is how you tell it. And in making this argument I have demonstrated how jokes and anecdotes are meant to be used in a larger context.

Notice that Botkin specifically mentions the use of anecdotes and jokes in speeches. This book may have been published in 1944, but there are plenty of professions in which public speeking is an essential skill today. In his introduction to 'Anecdotes and Jests,' Botkin goes on to talk about Abraham Lincoln as a lawyer and polititian. Plenty of writting goes into lawyering, but once a case is in the courtroom, it is effective storytelling that is going to sway the jury. And as for polititians, they have to convince us to elect them, and alot of that convincing is done in speeches.

I have previously stated that some words mean more when they are spoken aloud. Jokes do. And when someone is trying to earn our trust, tyring to get us to believe in them, their words do, too.

Tickets To Where?

England is bursting with examples of how the spoken word and the written word evolve at a different pace.

One of the main and obvious differences between the spoken word and the written word is permanence. This will come up often as we discuss sound and sense, because believe it or not, the ephemeral nature of the spoken word can be a very good thing. If you have ever had a teacher collect a note you were passing in class, you may know what I mean.

As a word is used, the way that people pronounce it changes. Maybe it is hard to say, so they slur it into something easier. Maybe the change is based on a mixing of cultures causing a change of accent. You will recall that in many of the world's languages, the written word is meant to reflect the pronunciation of the spoken word. So, does spelling really change with pronunciation?

Since I am currently living in Norwich (which rhymes with porridge) I can definitively state that the written word is not keeping up. Other examples of deceptively spelled place names in England include: Wymondham (pronounced 'win-dom'), Leicester (pronounced 'les-ter'), and Grosvenor (pronounced 'grove-ner').

Spelling is standardized. We have dictionaries telling us exactly how words are spelled, and there is only one right way to do it. It is one thing for a group of people to subtly pronounce a word differently, until over time, they've left out an entire syllable. It is something else to take a word everyone agrees on the spelling of and start leaving letters out of it. So eventually, the spoken and written word pull apart until they hardly resemble one another at all. And since the written word was based on the spoken word in the first place, its connection with meaning becomes tenuous. When an American tourist asks for train tickets to 'Why-mond-ham' the British rail worker doesn't know where he wants to go.

The Relationship Between Sound and Sense

A word has three main parts: the written representation of the word, the spoken representation of the word, and the meaning.

First we may ask, 'What is the relationship between the written word and the meaning?' In some languages, the relationship is clear. For example, in a pictographic writing system, the written word is meant to illustrate its meaning. This does not mean that anyone can automatically read the language without any training. With complex thought comes the need to write about abstract concepts. You and I may understand that this <3 is a heart and can be used to mean 'love.' But someone from outside our culture might not read '<3' as 'love.' A native reader of a pictographic language, upon encountering a word he or she has never seen before, may be able to figure out what it means based on the way other symbols work and knowledge of the culture. However, he or she will not know how the word is pronounced.

What about languages that use an alphabet? In these languages symbols represent sounds, rather than meanings. A finite number of symbols can be arranged an infinite number of ways to transcribe the sounds of spoken words. Thus, what ends up on the page is almost entirely divorced from the meaning. Take a look at the word 'cat.' It in no way resembles the cute furry animal. A reader of this type of language, upon encountering a word he or she has never seen before, knows how the word is pronounced, but does not automatically know what it means.

Now let us consider the connection between sound and sense. In some instances the connection is clear. This is the case with onomatopoetic words. If you say 'woof,' what you mean is 'woof.' The sound is the sense. There is evidence of this in the fact that although different languages have slightly different words for animal noises, it is not difficult to figure out what animal is being imitated when you come across a variation you have not heard before. If you can hear a word and deduce its meaning from its sound alone, then there is a strong connection between sound and sense.

But aside from onomatopoeia, is there a connection? Because the spoken word developed from a need to communicate, I believe there must have been a more obvious connection once. Primitive man did not randomly make up sounds and assign them to meanings. There was a reason the words he said meant what they meant. Our present day languages have their roots in this meaning-rich communication and perhaps those underlying connections are still hidden in there somewhere.

Let us step away from the literal for a moment, however. Speech can mean more than the sum of its parts. In a world with Twitter and text messages, talking is not obsolete. Could it be that when we take the time to speak to one another, we are saying something?

I am a storyteller and a librarian. I have allegiances to both the spoken and written word. Speaking could never replace writing. Writing allows for complex and creative thought that is not possible without an external reservoir ('external' being, outside the brain), whether that be a piece of paper or a computer. On the other hand, I do not believe writing can ever truly replace speaking. The reason for this is the connection between sound and sense; both the fact that some words just mean more spoken aloud, and the fact that the act of speaking can be more meaningful than the act of writing.

Through this blog I hope to justify some of the ideas I have put forth in this introduction by writing about my experiences with sound and sense. And, yes, I do recognize the irony of defending the spoken word in a written medium.