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The Distance between Information
and the Human Lifeworld (Ong 43-44)

Oral

In an oral culture, information/language is shaped with reference to actual, familiar, lived experience. When a person has to explain something, s/he structures the information in terms of interactions between human beings, as it relates to events, people, or objects the listener sees in everyday life, or with a familiar story or proverb that have arisen from such familiar things. Sets of information such as lists, statistics, explanations, definitions, directions, names, or instructions are told only as part of a story or genealogy.

Examples

• The Latin root for the English word "sign" comes from the term "signum," which mean the standard that a unit of the Roman army carried aloft for visual identification, "the object one follows." The flags did not carry letters, but rather, some graphic image such as an eagle (Ong 75).
• The Greek word for the pronoun "him" originates from nature.

John 1:3 (KJV)
All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.

autos, Greek 846, Strong’s
autos, ow-tos'; from the particle au [perhaps akin to the base of Greek 109 (aer) through the idea of a baffling wind] (backward); the reflexive pronoun self, used (alone or in the compound Greek 1438 (heautou)) of the third person, and (with the properly personal pronoun) of the other persons :- her, it (-self), one, the other, (mine) own, said, ([self-], the) same, ([him-, my-, thy-]) self, [your-] selves, she, that, their (-s), them ([-selves]), there [-at, -by, -in, -into, -of, -on, -with], they, (these) things, this (man), those, together, very, which. Compare Greek 848 (hautou).

--Strong's Exhaustive Concordance to the King James Bible

• See how a transparent version of Genesis lets readers peer through to the original Hebrew text to see how close to life the original words are.

Literate

The distance that a literate culture fosters allows for the denatured, neutral, contextless, abstract information/language sets such as lists, statistics, encyclopedias, dictionaries, directions, or operating manuals apart from their role in a story or genealogy.

The creation of the name "Xerox" is at a remove from hands-on life: "Carlson, Battelle and Haloid agreed that 'electrophotography' was too cumbersome a name for the process. A classical language professor at Ohio State University suggested the new name: 'xerography', derived from the Greek words for 'dry' and 'writing'."

Further away still is Exxon: "Exxon - a name contrived by Esso (Standard Oil of New Jersey) in the early 70s to create a neutral but distinctive label for the company." It comes from the site below.

A look at the etymologies of many company names, however, shows overwhelming reference to life.

Exception: Primally-strong emotions trigger a default back to the oral mode.

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