Reading Assignment Day 1

I found the piece in Ong about the homeostasis state of primary oral cultures to be rather interesting. This piece explained that in primary oral cultures, if a word or term has lasted past its relevance in a culture, it does one of three things. It can change its meaning from an old definition to something different, more relevant to its current time of use. The phrase could die out and be forgotten by that culture, seeing as it is of no more use it need not survive. And finally the words could struggle and hold on, losing there inherent meaning and essentially becoming nonsensical due to the user's ignorance of the meaning.

This last piece is what really had me wondering something. Do we, and by we I mean Americans of our age, part of our generation, do we use words like this regularly without really understanding the definition? As stated by Ong this is not something really possible outside of a primary oral culture because in literate cultures we always have something to look back upon to remember what a words original definition or sue was. According to Ong, in a literate culture, "Words thus are known to have layers of meaning, many of them quite irrelevant to present meanings. Dictionaries advertise semantic discrepancies" (Ong p.46). So of course today we have the ability to trace back a words roots to fully understand its storied life, but is it at all possible for this kind of thing to exist in our culture?

It is hard for me to comprehend a phrase to have no real meaning but still be used today in certain situations. Ong uses the example of the talking drums of the Lokele people in Eastern Zahir. Some of the things said in this practice are completely unknown to the drummer. I think that this ability to have this sort of 'genealogical amnesia' is a great example of the differences between oral and literary cultures. It is hard for me to wrap my head around the idea that we can just forget what something means and yet have it still hold place in current practice.