Written Words Are Residue Walter Ong

Written words are residue.

Oral tradition has no such residue or deposit …

Though words are grounded in oral speech, writing tyrannically locks them into a visual field forever.

A literate person, asked to think of the word ‘nevertheless’, will normally (and I strongly suspect always) have some image, at least vague, of the spelled-out word and be quite unable ever to think of the word ‘nevertheless’ for, let us say, 60 seconds without adverting to any lettering but only to the sound.

This is to say, a literate person cannot fully recover a sense of what the word is to purely oral people.

Credit: Walter Ong