Time has opened up for me; so has my ability to keep focusing on my exploration of Ong’s characteristics of an oral culture.
Today’s target is
Aggregative rather than analytic
Linguistic Formulas
“The elements of orally based thought and expression tend to not be so much simple integers as clusters of integers…” He goes on to explain it’s clusters & phrases. His examples are “not the soldier, but the brave soldier not the princess, but the beautify princess.”
Oral cultures tend to be consistent in using consistent descriptive adjectives. Not simply saying a soldier or princess. This doesn’t exclude the opportunity for an alternate adjectives such as, his examples, “braggart soldier” or “unhappy princess” but the default position is this aggregate term and default aggregate repeated over and over until normalized.
These might not really ring so true today in terms of simple descriptive adjectives. However when you expand the language to longer phrases, and acronyms, things start to become interesting.
- YOLO – You only live once
- FOMO – fear of missing out
- MAGA – make america great again
- GOAT – greatest of all time
- BFF – best friends forever
- LMAO – laugh my ass off
- LOL – laugh our loud.
- ROFL – roll on the floor laughing
- PITA – pain in the ass
- TMI – too much information
- NSFW – not safe for work
All of these can be used otherwise yet we don’t.
I could reveal some thing intimate and use alternate words, but I don’t. I say TMI, keeping the phrase intact and crystalized.
Each acronym or phrase cannot be altered. FOLO is not a thing.
… rather than analytic
Now comes the analytic part. For Ong, the argument was simply put that “Without a writing system, breaking up thought – that is, analysis – is a high risk process.” He then drops-the-mic with a quote from Levi-Stauss, “the savage [i.e. oral] mind totalizes.”
Essentially he’s saying that oral thought cannot piece meal a concept. It can not look at something in isolation but must have context, inter-connection, situation, as a whole. Saying “a friend” would be like…
It would be an unfinished sentence to an oral mind and require the formula and some form of aggregate language.
Is that to say, if I say “best friend” would an oral mind place it in the default position and complete the phrase adding “forever”? If I were to mention “laughing” would there be mental chaos because someone isn’t sure if I’m doing it “out loud” or “rolling on the floor” from it?
Perhaps the term itself is negated and ignored? Thinking, “they aren’t really friends because Nick never clarified it was best or forever.” Or, “He didn’t ‘literally’ laugh because he didn’t say it was out loud.”
Maybe for the aliterate a little analysis is allowed? But perhaps not too much.
