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Turbaconwordducken is a turkey stuffed with a duck stuffed with a chicken. The entire thing is then wrapped in a layer of bacon and then braised with Crisco. After wrapping, the cook scrawls, with a permanent marker, various verses from "The Big Book of Absurdities" on the birdball rendering the thing entirely inedible.

What follows is a brief summary to the first chapter of Walter J. Ong's "Orality and Literacy".

(Walter Ong compensates for his small feet by writing books)

For the sake of argument, Ong first divides the linguistic world into two camps, the "Literate" and the "Oral". He then uses the writing of one cool cat to five some real meat to his argument.

Ferdinand de Saussure, fahther ov mahdurn liingguistiks, buhleevd wrihting 2-b: "a complement to Oral speech, not a transformer."

(wahz gunna right liek ths ahl teh way thru, but I got lazy.)

Henry Sweet augmented the views of Saussure by insisting that we create words through the assemblage of "functional sound units or phonemes."

(I told my nemesis that he was my phonehmee and he died.)

They believed that the sound and feeling of the oral word was the arbiter of the written, not the other way around. Their beliefs came in reaction to the long time teaching that oral traditions were only important measured by their written cousins. Walter Ong supports this philosophy with his notion of, "Primary Orality".

An Primary Orality is defined as Orality pertaining to a people who can't read nor write. Through these cultures, Ong has examples of societies that live in his prestructural ideal.

Ong points out on page 8 that, "Writing can never dispose with Orality."

(One time, Writing disposed of Orality and a refridgerator fell on its head.)

he justifies his point by illustrating that, "Writing is a secondary modeling system" which depends a primary system known as "Oral Speech".

"Oral Speech" is when people make sounds with their mouth and lungs that are somewhat coherent.

Throughout the chapter, Ong defends the notion that Language is based more so on Orality than the written word. He cites the Greek writing, "Rhetoric", which was a big discourse on the subject of talking about things. It created a "scientific art" (mind you, this is using a very loose definition of the word science) or a theory for the spoken word.

(science science lol)

It showed "how a body of explanation" could have been created that showed , "how and why oratory achieved and could be made to achieve its various specific effects (pg. 9)."

This is used as an element to give historical context and justification for the initial thesis of the piece.

Towards the end of his essay Ong presents a few disclaimers for his vocabulary. The first is that the term "primary" in "Primary Orality" exists only in contrast to "secondary orality" which is what we do on cell phones and the like--a kind of oral mechanism, somewhat abstracted. He also, on page 12, admits that literacy is powerful and that the theory as a whole is a bit of a give/take proposition.

(I can't remember if this next part is from the reading or from the lecture that the professor who evoked this blag gave. Eitherway it's a cool concept.)

This first chapter is about "reconstruction". The reconstruction of the part of the mind-brain-thing that controls our language usage in order to create a better understanding of the relationship between things coming out of your mouth and written wordstuffs.


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