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Aggregative

Oral

The oral culture is aggregative, employing clusters of adjectives, parallel and/or antithetical terms, phrases or clauses, epithets, cliches that may be good or bad (Ong 38). It piles adjectives onto nouns.

Examples

• Timmy: You mean to tell me that you went home and swiped a ball that was signed by BABE RUTH, and you brought it out here and actually played with it?
Tommy: Actually played with it?
Smalls: Yeah. Yeah, but I was gonna bring it back.
Squints: But it was signed by Babe Ruth!
Smalls: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, you keep telling me that! Who is she?
Ham Porter: WHAT? WHAT?
Kenny: The sultan of swat!
Bertram: The king of crash!
Timmy: The colossus of clout!
Tommy: The colossus of clout!
All: BABE RUTH!
Ham Porter: THE GREAT BAMBINO!
Smalls: Oh my god! You mean that's the same guy?
All: YES!!

The first time Smalls hears of the Great Bambino | See the above scene on YouTube (first two minutes)

See the IMDB page for The Sandlot

• The beautiful, white - armed Hera, .... the swift runner Achilles... Briseis in all her beauty -- The Iliad by Homer

• In the 1987 film, Dragnet, characters, Pep Streebeck (Tom Hanks) and Sgt. Joe Friday (Dan Aykroyd) have an epithet they apply to the female lead, Connie Swail (Alexandra Paul).

Literate

The literate culture is analytic, breaking one thing into its components, offering logical reasons, not descriptive names or titles, along with the passion.

Examples

• George Herman Ruth, Jr. was born on February 6, 1895 in Baltimore, Maryland. His parents were Kate Schamberger-Ruth and George Herman Ruth, Sr., who tended bar and eventually owned his own tavern near the Baltimore waterfront. The Ruths had a total of eight children, but only two survived past infancy: a daughter named Mamie and a son named George, Jr. -- the boy who would grow up to be an American hero. ...

-- The Official Babe Ruth Web Site

• Jimmy Dugan: Taking a little day trip?
Dottie Hinson: No, Bob and I are driving home. To Oregon.
Jimmy: [long pause] You know, I really thought you were a ballplayer.
Dottie: Well, you were wrong.
Jimmy: Was I?
Dottie: Yeah. It is only a game, Jimmy. It's only a game, and, and, I don't need this. I have Bob; I don't need this. At all.
Jimmy: I, I gave away five years at the end my career to drink. Five years. And now there isn't anything I wouldn't give to get back any one day of it.
Dottie: Well, we're different.
Jimmy: It's chickensh*t, Dottie, if you want to go back to Oregon and make a hundred babies, great, I'm in no position to tell anyone how to live. But sneaking out like this, quitting, you'll regret it for the rest of your life. Baseball is what gets inside you. It's what lights you up, you can't deny that.
Dottie: It just got too hard.
Jimmy: It's supposed to be hard. If it wasn't hard, everyone would do it. The hard... is what makes it great.

| See the above scene on YouTube (7 minutes in) | -- A League of Their Own

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

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