October 1

One idea in this writing that intrigues me is the concept that writing effectively takes the place of memory. Where ancient poets committed entire works to memory, they no longer are forced to, freeing them to experiment with individual form as opposed to memorization. This concept, that writing thus transformed what language was by freeing the author makes sense and as we explore various technologies and how they can make us even freer, we discover new ways to communicate our own voices.

Also, the idea that writing was really the translation of language from spoken form into written form, rather than a capturing of the speech is interesting. I think a lot of people carry the misconception with them that all of a sudden in history scribes showed up and started putting pen to paper each letter and word spoken verbatim. However, because language spoken is such a different beast than language written, there must be a filter by which the reader can understand, albeit it in different way than the listener understands.

Often people speak about how speech differs from the written word—“people would never actually talk like they do in novels”—and likewise, writers who would never dare to violate a stroke of grammatical law may be heard throwing around slang words and run-on sentences in haphazard fashion. Neither way is better; they each have their own rules and each serve a specific function.

Another idea that interested me was that writing changes language as much as it records it. If we can see how slang words seep into the written word, we can also see how written words seep back into spoken language. Writers create new words and concepts and everyone cheers and spreads those ideals around and around until speeches are given or other works are written to spin the original idea. Everything is in flux and everything changes with time. This is as true now in the printed age as it was before, when poets used to update and take stories, making them their own but relying on the same basic outline. Stories once changed with every telling. And while language is still in flux and ideas are still in flux, written language give a semi-permanent record of what language was like at that moment. We can hear our history through written volumes and thus try to imagine what language was back then, who the people were in times past. Writing records a version of the truth, but only a version.