Orality and Literacy by Rob Dufour

I was doing an assignment for this class a little while ago and we had to state the meaning of certain words according to our culture and then again for an oral culture. I began thinking about the words and I had a hard time explaining exactly what they meant to me. While I was thinking of definitions for the these words I had the bright idea of just going to the dictionary and seeing if Webster could help me out – but then it dawned on me that me wanting to go the dictionary is pretty much what the assignment was aimed at conveying to us. We, in a literate culture, feel the need to confine every object or idea to a defined string of words. Our text “Orality and Literacy” discusses this in a few sections, one of which the author speaks about how we have invented dictionaries to record formal definitions which represent words as having multiple layers of meaning – these dictionaries ultimately advertise certain semantic discrepancies. This is in contrast to Oral cultures obviously not having dictionaries and few semantic discrepancies. The meaning of each word is controlled by the real life situations in which the word is used. Words acquire their meanings from their actual habitat which includes the entire human and how we embrace the word. We also tend to think of words as signs which are due to our tendency to reduce our human experiences to visual analogues. The book tells us that the oral man is unlikely to think of words as signs because their words are free and constantly moving in flight in their mind. It’s an amazing thing to try to image – words constantly moving throughout our head and not being confined to a sign, however it’s almost impossible for us to even imagine it. We are too use to a textual, visual representation of a word – but the representation isn’t the actual word. It is impossible for text to be more than marks on a surface unless it is used by a conscious human being as a cue to sounded words. What you are reading right now are not real words but simply symbols that you have been taught to decode which evoke in your consciousness real words in either actual or imagined sound. Crazy to think about, huh?