Ong's 9 characteristics

I decided to study for the test by going through Walter Ong's 9 characteristics of orally based thought and expression, and I also constructed a memory palace for them, which you can read at the end. As we all know, Walter Ong was a Jesuit priest who focused his attention on the difference between oral and literate cultures. I wish everyone good luck on the test today. Here we go:

(i) Additive rather than subordinative. Oral cultures emphasize linking phrases like the word 'and' because it allows for momentum in story. "Written discourse," on the other hand, "develops more elaborate and fixed grammar than oral discourse does because to provide meaning it is more dependent simply upon linguistic structure, since it lacks the normal full existential contexts which surround oral discourse and help determine meaning in oral discourse somewhat independently of grammar" (Ong 61-2). Ong uses different translations of the bible to illustrate this point. An early version from 1610 brought to us from Latin still uses many 'ands'; however, the New American Bible (1970) has eliminated all but two in the Genesis passages cited by Ong. He claims this is because the 1610 Douay version still has "oral residue" from earlier cultures.

(ii) Aggregative rather than analytic. "Oral folk prefer," according to Ong, "[...] not the soldier, but the brave soldier; not the princess, but the beautiful princess; not the oak, but the sturdy oak" (62). These epithets are used because they enhance the memory for the thing. "Without a writing system, breaking up thought--that is, analysis--is a high risk procedure" (Ong 63). The epithets carry the burden of tradition and history, something that our literate culture can preserve through the written word. They are formulas that ought not be too thoroughly analyzed.

(iii) Redundant or 'copious'. In other classes, I have heard that something needs to be repeated many times before it fully sticks in the conscious. This is an important factor in an oral culture because they can not scan over a line again and again to understand its meaning. "The oral utterance has vanished as soon as it is uttered" (63) says Ong, and "redundancy, repetition of the just-said, keeps both speaker and hearer surely on the track" (63). An interesting fact which Ong relates is that hand-writing is about one-tenth the speed of speaking. This process lets the writer think through his thoughts at a slower pace than that of the talker; on the other hand, the talker will often have to repeat his thoughts to fully form them in his mind. It would be interesting to see how this has changed with the advent of typing--especially with things like Facebook and Twitter. As for public speaking, Ong says, "Not everyone in a large audience understands every word a speaker utters, if only because of acoustical problems. It is advantageous for the speaker to say the same thing, or equivalently the same thing, two or three times" (64). Hesitation is also jarring during speech, thus if the speaker gets lost in his words, being redundant can re-track him to his original thought but not mess with his presentation.

(iv) Conservative or traditionalist. "Since in a primary oral culture conceptualized knowledge that is not repeated aloud soon vanishes, oral societies must invest great energy in saying over and over again what has been learned arduously over the ages" (Ong 65). With the creation of the alphabet, societies could delegate some of these traditional aspects into laws and written religion, thus lessening the need for such proverbial wisdom. People could instead invest their energies into other aspects of their psyche, especially the individual, without having to worry about preserving the culture at large. However, it is also important to remember that oral cultures can be extremely creative in that each time a story is re-uttered, the teller will riff on old themes, extirpate ones which are no longer relevant, add characters, scenes, and dialogue, and all together fulfill the needs of his audience like any good performer does.

(v) Close to the human lifeworld. Because of the structure which oral culture must take, it would do little for a person to memorize long sets of statistics. In fact, undergoing this task would be quite useless. According to Ong, how-to-manuals were non-existent, and the importance of apprenticeships ten-fold greater because they were the only way to preserve skills; so primary oral speakers were "little concerned with preserving knowledge or skills as an abstract, self-subsistent corpus" (Ong 67).


According to this website, a secluded tribe near the Brazil-Peru border aiming their arrows at a low-flying plane, 2008.

(iv) Agonistically toned. Writing "separates the knower from the known" (Ong 67). Because a writing culture will often focus their attention in the abstract, lonely world of ink and paper, and not engage with others constantly to form their ideas, there can be a distance when two people meet. The only way to discover what you believe is by bouncing ideas off others in an oral culture. Verbal sparring is thus common because people are always interacting. There is no time to hide in a corner and write about your life in a journal: there is only community. "Violence," according to Ong, "in oral art forms is also connected with the structure of orality itself. When all verbal communication must be by direct word of mouth, involved in the give-and-take dynamics of sound, interpersonal relations are kept high--both attractions and, even more, antagonisms" (69). This holds true with praise, which we can see echoes of in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar.

(vii) Empathetic and participatory rather than objectively distanced. "For an oral culture learning or knowing means achieving close, empathetic, communal identification with the known (Havelock 1963, pp. 145-6), 'getting with it'. Writing separates the knower from the known and thus sets up conditions for 'objectivity', in the sense of personal disengagement and distancing" (Ong 69). Speaking requires different tools than writing, and the most important is the ability to get the audience emotionally involved with what the talker is saying. By distancing the listeners from the subject matter, the speaker will risk having a disinterested audience. This holds especially true for an audience in an oral culture.

(viii) Homeostatic. Oral cultures live in the present because they cannot turn to the written words of their ancestors. Thus, if something is no longer relevant to their community, it will fall away because it is no longer practical to know. For those curious, the term comes from a Greek word which means "standing still".

(ix) Situational rather than abstract. "All conceptual thinking is to a degree abstract," Ong says. "So 'concrete' a term as 'tree' does not refer simply to a singular 'concrete' tree but is an abstraction, drawn out of, away from, individual, sensible actuality; it refers to a concept which is neither this tree nor that tree but can apply to any tree" (Ong 73). The more abstract the idea, the less chance the oral culture will have a word for it. Thus geometrical figures like circles, squares, or octahedron have no term but are assigned the names of similarly shaped objects. They will also tend to group items which go together by purpose, such as a tree and an axe, not an axe and a hammer. Categorizing objects, in fact, seems to be completely uninteresting to someone from an oral culture, and there is widespread resistance to describing real-life objects like a tree. When asked this question by the researcher, Luria, one peasant replied "Why should I? Everyone knows what a tree is, they don't need me telling them." (Ong 77). This sort of analysis also extended to the self. It is difficult for a non-literate person to describe their 'inner' life because they have never had a means to structure it. They simply 'are'. If they do try to analyze themselves, they go about it by saying what other people think of them, or in the second person, 'we'.

Now for the memory palace, which is at the Rocking R Bar.



I walk into the Rocking R Bar and see a plus sign trying to incorporate a minus sign but failing. An Aggregator (alligator wearing a tutu like in a Disney movie) is dancing on the dance floor with an analytical giraffe wearing glasses and observing with a pen on a bar stool. The copious bar tender is striking the counter redundantly. As I walk further in on the right hand side of the serving bar, I run into a conservative nun wearing a traditional outfit. Further in by the pool tables I see a hole in the earth with dancing shadows. A large man shouts at me as I start to circle back around to the front door. I walk past and an empathetic, naked woman hugs me, telling me she is sorry that I had to participate in conversation with such a mean man. Near the door, a gay man leans against the frame wearing silver '70s clothing. I walk back outside thinking of the strange situations I get into in that bar. If only it could be more abstract.