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.