0:18

Malcolm Killing Things the other the

0:20

podcast enthusiastic about linguistics. I'm Lauren

0:22

Gone and I'm Gretchen Metallic. and

0:25

today we're getting enthusiastic about url

0:27

storytelling. But. First we have

0:29

a fun new thing that

0:31

you can do which is

0:33

that we've created a highly

0:35

scientific. Personality Quiz

0:38

where you can answer some very

0:40

it fun and fanciful questions and

0:42

find out which link these years

0:44

of episode most closely corresponds. With

0:46

those responses, If. You're new to

0:48

the podcast and you're trying to figure

0:50

out what episode to start with or

0:52

if you've been with us for ages.

0:54

Any want to dive into the back

0:57

catalog or if you're trying to figure

0:59

out which episode to recommend to a

1:01

friend Al incredibly unscientific, often amusing. a

1:03

question to quiz is therefore you to

1:05

find the perfect episode. You. Mean

1:07

you don't think that like a which

1:09

beverage someone who corresponds to which linked

1:11

because you'll episode they're going to like

1:13

I. Think. This is very scientific.

1:16

Absolutely on validated, Absolutely untested.

1:18

They are entirely for your

1:20

amusement at Bit.l Y flash

1:22

linked to the Esm quiz.

1:25

On. But very fun. You.

1:27

Can also find the link in the episode units.

1:30

In. Our most recent bonus episode. We

1:32

take this quiz ourselves to find out

1:34

which episode. We are, although of course we love

1:36

all of them as our children. And we

1:38

also talk about the results of our

1:41

Twenty Twenty Three listener survey. This.

1:43

One is rigorously scientifically constructed and

1:45

tested and we have all the

1:47

results including whether links easy as

1:49

I'm is more key, heat or

1:51

breather and we discuss the results

1:53

of important questions like is the

1:56

fum a finger and is your

1:58

sister's husband's sister still yours. drain

2:00

wall. You can go

2:02

to patreon.com/Lingthusiasm to get access

2:04

to this bonus episode and

2:06

way more behind the scenes

2:08

and other fun topic bonus

2:10

episodes that help us keep the show running for all of

2:12

you. A

2:25

conversation I enjoy having is

2:28

to ask two people how they

2:30

met because sometimes you'll get this

2:32

wonderfully honed and polished version of

2:35

the story that they've both told that may

2:38

not actually be entirely the original story

2:40

but is the story of how they

2:42

met. And sometimes you get two completely

2:44

different takes on the event and that

2:47

has its own value as well. Lae

2:50

Whereas I swear

3:12

by the story that Gretchen was like, I

3:14

would love to do a podcast. And I

3:16

was like, I have skills that I could

3:19

bring to your great idea for a podcast.

3:21

We should do this together. G And

3:25

we had this conversation face

3:27

to face, not over email,

3:30

or over DMS, or in somewhere where it

3:32

might have been recorded. So we have no

3:35

record to know whose version of this

3:37

memory is sort of factually

3:39

what happened. But emotionally, both of us

3:41

think that it was the other person's idea first, which I

3:43

think is really funny. Lae I've even

3:46

gone back to look at early written

3:48

interactions that we've had to see who

3:51

started the conversation from social

3:53

media through to like Dms

3:56

And emails. And I'll tell you what,

3:58

direct messages on social media, Social media

4:00

platforms. I'm not an archivist friend.

4:03

Yeah, it's really hard to actually find out

4:06

what's going on and even our first emails

4:08

to each other which we can find are

4:10

like continuing the conversations and dm yeah. But.

4:13

This tendency to. Want.

4:16

To have our life histories

4:19

documented is a. Very.

4:22

Written culture, technology sort

4:24

of thing. and it's

4:26

what made me. Recommend

4:29

to you to read this short

4:31

story by Ted Chiang them who

4:33

I knew that you'd heard of

4:35

as the author of. Story of Your

4:38

Life which is the short story. That was adapted

4:40

into the movie Arrival. And. He has

4:42

his other short story called the Truth of Fact

4:44

the Truth of Feeling of I thought you would

4:46

enjoy. You want to give us a little summary

4:49

other shaw and it. We've already talked about the

4:51

fact that pricing is. A. Technology We

4:53

have a whole episode on

4:55

the idea of putting symbols

4:58

on to clay or paper

5:00

or taught herself is. A

5:02

very particular. Cultural. Invention.

5:04

But what I like about the short

5:06

story is it gets to. The.

5:09

Point is that this technology brings with

5:11

at all of these. Social.

5:13

Changes and social dynamics.

5:15

Ah, that create literacy.

5:17

And so it's a

5:20

short story. Thoughts: Ah,

5:22

You get to for the price of

5:24

one. There were like two completely different

5:26

narrative ah that are happening in the

5:29

story and the one that the civically

5:31

that writing is about teaching the who

5:33

is a kid feet or from Cleveland

5:35

and a missionary named more is the

5:38

a rise in his village and judging

5:40

the is the only person in the

5:42

village hers takes most the up on.

5:44

The offer to learn how to

5:47

write and. Movie. comes

5:49

along with a whole colonial

5:51

project very much like british

5:53

colonial vibe ah were writing

5:55

comes along as a technology

5:58

that is used to govern

6:01

people administratively. So along

6:03

with writing comes record-keeping

6:05

and trying to write

6:07

down and codify histories and rules and

6:09

that brings with it all these changes

6:12

to the social fabric of Tivland. Lae

6:14

I liked this story because it

6:17

talks about the effect of the

6:19

transition from oral culture to written culture on memory

6:22

and cultural shift and

6:24

one of the ways that Chang illustrates

6:28

this is by having the second sort

6:30

of strand of this braided story which

6:32

features an unnamed journalist as the narrator

6:35

who is talking about this futuristic technology

6:37

which is, you know, the story is

6:39

set some unknown number of years in

6:41

the future when everyone has started using

6:44

Remem which is sort of optical

6:46

cameras sort of you're carrying

6:49

around this iris cam which is just giving

6:51

you access to video footage of

6:53

a whole bunch of things that have

6:55

happened in your life all of these moments that would have

6:57

gone undocumented like the moment when Lauren and

6:59

I decided to start a podcast. Lae Yeah,

7:01

we could go back and get the definitive

7:03

version which, you know, for us

7:05

would be an amusing resolution but our

7:08

unnamed protagonist goes back to look at

7:10

all the arguments he had with his

7:12

teenage daughter which like is never gonna

7:14

end well. Lae And so it

7:17

causes the unnamed narrator of that

7:19

story to reassess his

7:21

relationship with his daughter

7:23

and the accuracy or

7:25

the emotional truth of these memories that

7:28

he's been feeling in one particular way and

7:30

how it feels to go back and look

7:33

at them from the perspective of this disinterested

7:35

camera which is also present at the scene.

7:37

Lae And we are so familiar

7:39

with writing as a technology and as

7:41

a memory tool it was kind of

7:43

nice to be put in the position

7:45

of being slightly bamboozled by this future

7:47

technology and how that would once again

7:49

make us reassess our relationship with as

7:52

the title the story says the truth of fact

7:55

and the truth of feeling. Lae We'll link to those

7:57

short stories it's available online I definitely endorse

7:59

your question. reading it. What did you

8:01

think about it when you read it? I

8:04

assume that the

8:06

story of Jujingi is, it

8:09

seems to be drawing on the kind

8:11

of thing that we see happen when

8:14

Western cultures brought literacy in with them

8:16

because there's all these dynamics around the

8:19

written record changing the

8:21

oral tradition where different

8:23

tribes would talk about how they were related to each

8:25

other and then they were like, no, because you've written

8:27

it down here and the written version

8:30

is a definitive version, so we're not

8:32

going to honor the current status of

8:34

knowledge about which group your group is

8:36

aligned with. It seems like the

8:38

specifics of that were fiction,

8:40

but it seems to really capture

8:42

the vibe of that. Well,

8:46

interestingly, so this

8:48

specific case is a real case that

8:50

happened and of course the specific names

8:52

of the people involved and what they

8:54

were thinking I think are indeed fictionalized,

8:56

but the Tiv people of Nigeria had

8:59

a set of genealogies that were being

9:01

used in settling court disputes and

9:03

they were recorded by the British in

9:06

the colonial context and then

9:08

they diverged in the oral tradition

9:10

from the written thing and then the

9:12

later oral people were saying, no, you

9:14

guys have written down the wrong thing,

9:16

we have what's true here. Because

9:19

that's what's true at this point in time

9:21

for like we're friends with this community over

9:23

here right now and not this other village,

9:25

so we're going to update the story to

9:27

reflect the current state of things. G-

9:30

Right, and there isn't perceived to be a rupture

9:32

in that the way writing can create a rupture

9:35

between your perceived self

9:38

versus the version of yourself that you've projected

9:40

into the past. So what I

9:42

was told was that Chang had

9:45

read an academic manuscript about

9:47

the effects of orallacy and

9:49

literacy on cultures and

9:51

on humans by an academic

9:54

named Walter J. Ong and

9:56

sort of been inspired to take

9:58

a few sentences from that and

10:00

expand. that into a whole short

10:02

story that elaborates on the emotional truths

10:04

addressed in that relatively dry

10:07

academic fashion. It's

10:09

very satisfying because I was like this feels like a

10:11

story but it did feel grounded in an understanding

10:14

of how literacy can change

10:16

social dynamics. Yeah so

10:18

I was inspired to read

10:20

the academic book as well by this

10:22

but the short story conveys these truths

10:25

in a more vivid

10:27

storytelling way which sort of gets

10:29

to the whole storytelling themes that

10:32

come up from making things memorable

10:34

by telling them as stories. And

10:36

I appreciate you sent me the short story and not

10:38

the 200 page academic manuscript.

10:41

I read the 200 page academic manuscript and I think

10:43

it's very interesting we will return to more

10:45

things from the Ong book so that

10:47

not everybody has to read it. But

10:50

one of the things that

10:52

reading this Ong book about

10:54

orality and literacy made me

10:56

reflect on was what he

10:58

calls residual orality. Little

11:01

pockets of our lives and our experiences

11:03

that may still be in an oral

11:05

culture even when we're living predominantly

11:07

written cultures which you know you and I

11:09

are both predominantly in a written culture. And

11:12

one example of this coming up in

11:14

my life was I'm just

11:17

sort of young enough to remember when social

11:20

media changed the

11:22

way that gossip worked to

11:25

be more written from being more oral.

11:28

Ah yes. So I remember in

11:31

a sort of pre-facebook era of

11:33

gossip where let's

11:35

say there was a party and I

11:37

wasn't there. If some

11:40

sort of big drama happened at the party you know

11:42

I can't believe so-and-so said this to so-and-so there's a

11:44

big fight or something and I wanted to

11:46

sort of reconstruct what happened. I had to go talk to

11:48

a bunch of people and I remember doing this talk to

11:50

a bunch of people get their sort of stories which

11:53

would all be a little bit different from each other and

11:55

kind of decide what I believed

11:57

from that based on my knowledge of

11:59

these people and their personalities and what they were likely to

12:01

tell as a story. And

12:04

I remember being a really weird experience

12:06

when Facebook started and people would be

12:08

posting things that were sort of in

12:10

view of just their friends and you

12:12

could see similar types of dramas playing

12:14

out. You know, I can't believe what

12:16

this person said to this person. But

12:18

you could actually read the whole thing and you could be present

12:21

for the whole thing and you could

12:23

have that sort of factive truth of

12:26

sort of witnessing the whole thing even though if you weren't

12:28

there at the time because in a few hours later it

12:30

would still be there. And the pulling out

12:32

your phone to tell someone some gossip

12:34

that's happened because you want to

12:36

hold up the Instagram photo or

12:38

you want to show them the,

12:40

you know, Facebook thread where all

12:43

the drama went down. Right.

12:45

Like screencap culture of, I can't believe this

12:47

person said this thing. I'm going to take

12:49

a screencap and just show it to you

12:51

rather than I'm going to report the story

12:54

of what happened from my perspective has

12:57

made gossip more of

12:59

a written culture than an oral culture where

13:02

we have less acceptance for the fact that things may

13:04

change a bit in the retelling or you may retell

13:07

the version as you experienced it from

13:09

your own perspective and sort of massage it

13:11

to be more of

13:13

a story with emotional beats at

13:15

particular places. Now

13:17

you pull out a screencap or you pull out the actual

13:20

version. Let me just read you what this person sent me

13:22

and gossip has gotten more written in

13:24

the last like 20 years. Which

13:28

you can phrase that as a loss and

13:30

it's also harder for people to deny obviously

13:32

jerkish behavior so there are

13:34

pluses to it but it is something

13:36

that's changed. Another

13:38

area that I think of as residual oral culture

13:40

is when it comes to fairy tales and as

13:42

a kid it took me a long time and

13:45

I think a lot of people struggle with this tension

13:47

where the animated

13:50

film version of a fairy tale is different to

13:52

the picture book that you have which is

13:54

different to a different picture book

13:56

that someone else might have or the version that your

13:58

grandmother told you. not from

14:00

a book, just the version that she had. And

14:03

this is how fairy tales

14:05

traditionally go. And this

14:07

idea that there's like a written canonical version

14:10

kind of came about when the Grimm

14:13

Brothers decided to record

14:16

fairy tales that they had encountered

14:18

as part of their general documenting

14:21

of German language and German history.

14:23

I love that the Grimm

14:25

Brothers are known most broadly for

14:27

their fairy tale writing down. In linguistics,

14:29

they're known for doing all of this

14:32

amazing historical research on the sounds of

14:34

German and proto German. And

14:36

so fairy tales are like their secondary claim to

14:38

fame for linguists. But

14:41

giving the sort of claim to fame

14:43

of the people who did the documentation

14:46

when what they were actually doing

14:48

was documenting a thing that was

14:50

in the collective memory of a group of people

14:53

is a theme that keeps coming back when

14:55

it comes to oral culture. And

14:58

again, like I am

15:00

grateful to the Grimm Brothers for writing all of these

15:02

stories down because otherwise I probably wouldn't know them, as

15:05

with many of the documentaries. But on the other

15:07

hand, they sort of end up

15:10

getting credit or claiming credit for all of these

15:12

people whose names we don't know, who iterated

15:15

on various versions of these fairy

15:17

tales, because they were part of

15:19

a collective oral tradition. But

15:22

also writing something down doesn't mean

15:25

that it will stay a part of

15:27

the transmission traditions. You know, the Grimm

15:29

Brothers over multiple volumes and multiple re-versions

15:31

of it ended up with around 200

15:34

fairy tales. I don't know 200 fairy

15:36

tales. You

15:39

mean you don't know the three sneak leads?

15:42

I know Cinderella. Are

15:44

you looking forward to the animated remake of the mouse, the

15:47

bird and the sausage? I know the princess

15:49

and the pea. Some

15:52

Grimm fairy tales have stood the

15:54

test of time and others

15:57

have Not remained in transmission.

16:00

Group of people you might be ah from

16:02

a different part of the world where you

16:04

still north, Ah, the Magic Table, the Gold

16:06

Donkey, and the Club. In the fact that

16:09

hours of not one that I've kept in

16:11

my family repository of stories. Split.

16:13

Writing less things remain in an archive

16:16

for someone to rediscover, rather than the

16:18

sort. Of cultural pruning of the oral

16:20

tradition where the bit suggests remembered or

16:22

the bit to get continually repeated. And

16:24

as a lot of our a culture

16:26

that we only have thanks to the

16:29

written form hi Mom and the Homeric

16:31

episodes the Iliad in the Odyssey only

16:33

exist because someone at some point wrote

16:35

down a version of those stories. Will

16:38

and somebody who who may or may

16:40

not have been a guy named homer.

16:42

But. I have a statue of the bus to

16:44

final like he was a person. I

16:47

mean, there's certainly was some

16:49

person and some people somewhere,

16:52

but Homer is in many

16:54

ways a. Sort. Of cultural

16:56

so caloric figure himself,

16:59

so. By tradition.

17:02

These poems are attributed to Homer,

17:04

but they may not have even

17:06

been written by the same dude.

17:08

They certainly seem to have some

17:11

temporal distinctions between the Iliad and

17:13

the Odyssey, and they were definitely

17:15

part of the Ancient Greek oral

17:17

tradition because they have a lot

17:20

of structural features that are characteristic.

17:22

Of your own tradition, the sort. Of episodic structure, the

17:24

formulaic things like you know by Leo,

17:26

Dessie, Us and allied Athena and the

17:29

various epithets the get attached to the

17:31

characters who are these clear archetypes and

17:33

Homer himself. Lot We don't really know

17:36

if this idea that he was like

17:38

this blind guy is because one of

17:40

the bard's in one of the Homeric

17:42

poems. As blind and people have said,

17:45

well, maybe this is a self insert

17:47

because he himself was blind, we don't

17:49

know. Amazing. the paintings and the bus

17:52

and so on. Of Homer are all

17:54

produced like several hundred years later, and

17:56

they're sort of like fantastic adaptations. Of.

18:00

I actually feel more impressed when

18:02

I discovered that Homer wasn't a

18:04

single person. And in fact, this

18:07

whole debate about the

18:09

status of him is known as the Homeric

18:11

question. But I feel more

18:13

impressed knowing that there wasn't just one

18:16

person who told these stories, but there were

18:18

and still are people across

18:21

this region who would

18:23

remember thousands and thousands of

18:25

lines of oral stories and

18:28

be able to perform them not word for word

18:30

every time, but they would hit the same beats,

18:33

they would be transmitting the same stories, they would

18:35

all put their own spin on it, and

18:37

that this continued on for centuries and millennia.

18:40

And somehow I find that more powerful than

18:42

the idea that there was this one dude

18:44

in particular who was really good at this.

18:47

Yeah, it wasn't the sort of lone genius. It was

18:49

a culture that supported bardic storytelling.

18:53

And it wasn't necessarily a culture that just,

18:55

you know, disappeared with ancient

18:58

Greece. In fact, even

19:00

well into the 20th century, if you

19:02

went to the region in Europe

19:05

around there, there would be people

19:07

in, you know, mountain villages who

19:10

still sang epic songs of incredible

19:12

length. And Millman

19:14

Parry was an American classicist

19:16

who decided to see

19:19

if there were any modern homers

19:22

that was kind of put. And

19:24

he recorded one song that was performed

19:26

over five days and ended up being

19:28

like 13,000 lines,

19:31

which is just an amazing skill to

19:33

have and one that as a literate

19:35

person, I just don't, like I've

19:37

not grown up to be trained to have the kind

19:40

of memory to perform that kind of thing. That's

19:42

really neat. And I think a thing

19:45

that interests me about the question of

19:47

the Homeric recordings and Millman Parry's recordings

19:50

is that the Homeric

19:52

Greeks, who were whoever Homer

19:54

was, or all the

19:57

Homer's were, were

19:59

using this. new technology

20:01

to them of writing to

20:03

record these oral poems that

20:06

were very important to them culturally. Then

20:08

you have Millman Perry using

20:10

also the latest and greatest recording

20:13

technology which was what like wax

20:15

cylinders? Gosh I think it

20:17

was these like aluminium discs that they

20:19

had to swap out every five

20:22

minutes or something. I can't even imagine

20:24

the amount of equipment that they had

20:26

to move around to make this happen.

20:28

And yet it's still such a feat to

20:32

record like a five-day poem. There's

20:35

also a big

20:38

recording feat that happened in

20:40

the 1960s to record

20:42

the window epic from the Nyanga

20:44

people in the Congo. Oh

20:47

cool. And the poet there who

20:49

was Kandy Uroreke was asked

20:51

to narrate all of the stories of

20:53

Mundo who's the sort of hero of

20:55

these folk stories and said you

20:58

know never had anybody performed all

21:00

of the episodes in sequence. But

21:03

he narrated as a result of the

21:05

negotiations between the researchers who

21:07

wanted to do this all

21:09

of them window stories sometimes in prose

21:12

sometimes in verse over 12 days.

21:15

Oh my gosh. And there were

21:17

three scribes, two Nyanga scribes and one Belgian

21:19

scribe who were writing down his words at

21:21

the same time because it's obviously sort of

21:24

faster than a person can write. And

21:26

this is not like writing a novel

21:28

or a poem. It's

21:31

much more of a performance and

21:34

after the end of those 12 days he was exhausted

21:37

obviously. I'm not surprised. Yeah

21:40

but it's already framed in terms of like

21:42

the the demands of writing which says okay

21:44

we're going to try to do this in

21:46

a big tight sequence and have this sort

21:48

of efficient thing. Oral poems

21:50

are created to be told to

21:52

people for maybe you know an hour or two in

21:54

the evenings and then the next day you tell another

21:57

story for an hour or two and together they form

21:59

an episode. mythology of

22:01

here are all the stories of the gods or

22:04

here are all the stories of the heroes or

22:06

here are all the stories of these archetypal legendary

22:08

figures, you know, the the princesses

22:10

and the dragons and these types of things. And

22:13

as a member of the Nyanga community you hear

22:15

all the window stories across your lifetime. The idea

22:17

that you would sit down and tell them in

22:19

some kind of sequence is not

22:22

the normal way these are performed. Right,

22:25

exactly. So there's a story about

22:27

window who's the hero, the omnipotent

22:29

hero. His epithet is little one

22:31

just born he walked. So he

22:33

walked as soon as he was

22:35

born and there are stories

22:38

about how he climbed from the

22:40

womb and in one case emerged from his

22:42

mother's belly button. This is the

22:44

version from the recording with Rureke that

22:46

I was able to find. But I also saw

22:48

in a different encyclopedia that window

22:50

emerged from his mother's middle finger. So

22:54

they're both clearly doing a

22:56

sort of similar like preternatural

22:58

birth style story and

23:00

emerging from your belly button or from your

23:02

middle finger but the sort of details can

23:04

vary. But in both cases the important

23:06

stuff is still there where he is like helping

23:08

his mother with chores even while he's still in

23:10

the womb and he's walking and talking from the

23:13

moment he's born and his father is trying to

23:15

only have daughters because there's a prophecy that his

23:17

son will be his downfall. So he tries to

23:19

kill window even as a baby and of course

23:21

he doesn't succeed because this is a hero. What

23:24

a precocious child. Exactly but

23:26

the birth story is sort of one of the many

23:29

stories that gets told and isn't necessarily

23:31

told in sequence for its cycle. First he was

23:33

born and then this thing happened and then

23:35

this thing happened. You could pick any one of

23:37

them to tell on a given night. It's

23:40

interesting how we see stuff vary

23:42

in oral narratives but there's also

23:44

something really compelling about what is

23:46

emerging as the same across different

23:48

stories and often across large

23:51

areas. I mentioned briefly

23:53

that the Grimm Brothers kicked off

23:55

this whole recording of folk

23:57

stories and fairy stories across Europe and

23:59

beyond. and people have looked at the similarities

24:01

there. But there's this even

24:04

bigger story that I find really

24:06

compelling, which is the story of

24:08

the Seven Sisters, which I know

24:10

from indigenous Australian narrative tradition. Gail

24:12

De That

24:24

it's sort of like it shaped like a teeny tiny

24:26

big dipper, I think of it.

24:29

But in my recollection, when I've

24:31

looked at the Pleiades myself, I've

24:33

seen six stars. And yet the Greek

24:35

story is about the Seven Sisters, the

24:38

indigenous Australian story is about the Seven Sisters. Gail

24:40

De Yeah, the story

24:42

in Australia is about the same set

24:44

of Pleiades, of

24:46

which there are six, if you look in the sky

24:48

now, but some astronomers did

24:50

some research that looked at how

24:52

one of those stars is actually

24:55

two stars, one in front of

24:57

the other. And if you rewound

24:59

the sky 10,000 years, they would

25:01

be two different stars. Gail De

25:03

Whoa. Gail De And

25:05

the story of the Seven Sisters is that one of them is shy and

25:07

you don't see her and she hides herself. And

25:10

it seems like this story that

25:12

gets told across cultures is

25:14

to account for what has been a changing

25:16

of the sky across millennia. Gail

25:18

De That's fascinating. So this lost

25:21

seventh star or seventh person represented

25:23

by the star has been

25:26

found in European, African,

25:28

Asian, Indonesian, Native

25:30

American, indigenous Australian cultures that

25:33

have, I mean, they're a very clustery cluster. I have

25:35

to say, if you're looking at the night sky, looking

25:37

for like, I think these ones all go

25:39

together, they're very close, according to our visual perception on

25:41

Earth, I can see why you'd come up with a

25:44

story about them. Gail De And

25:46

being in the night sky is a really good hook

25:48

for remembering this story and continuing to pass it on

25:50

as you all look up into the sky. Gail

25:53

De Yeah, but the fact that this seventh

25:55

star has been transmitted for maybe 10,000

25:57

years is phenomenal.

26:00

Yeah, and a really great example of

26:02

how oral culture can

26:04

be a really great way of

26:06

preserving knowledge or recording history not

26:08

in the way that we think

26:10

about it with writing and not

26:12

to say that that's the

26:15

only value that it has because it absolutely

26:17

doesn't. But it is one really interesting thing

26:19

about the way we preserve and transmit these

26:21

stories. And we

26:23

don't have written records that are 10,000

26:25

years old. Writing is not that old. And

26:28

so when scientists have sometimes

26:31

wondered how could we

26:33

try to transmit a message

26:35

to people 10,000 years in the future, if

26:38

we look towards the past of what kinds

26:40

of things did get transmitted, maybe

26:42

we need to take inspiration from oral

26:44

cultures. And one

26:47

group of scientists and folklorists who've been trying to

26:49

figure out the way to transmit messages for

26:51

a long period of time are

26:53

people who are trying to come up with

26:56

long-term nuclear waste warning messages.

26:58

Lae Right,

27:07

so there's this

27:10

fascinatingly named field of

27:12

research called Nuclear Semiotics. G Oh,

27:15

that sounds amazing. What is that?

27:18

G Which is the study of

27:20

how to create nuclear warning messages

27:23

that will still be intelligible 10,000

27:25

years in the future. G Oh,

27:28

because we have that yellow triangle with the

27:30

black spiky symbol. But I've absolutely heard of

27:32

people who are like, my five-year-old looked at

27:35

that symbol and thought it was a flower.

27:38

G So, if you

27:40

use a skull, well, sometimes skulls are,

27:43

maybe it's pirates. G Yellow

27:46

might be meaning that it's something really cool

27:48

in here, rather than a bit of a

27:51

warning. G Right, and

27:53

there's a lot of proposals, and some of them are more

27:55

practical and some of them are a little bit more wacky.

27:58

Certainly writing it out in in a

28:00

whole bunch of different languages so that even

28:02

if some of them aren't in common use

28:04

in thousands of years, maybe at least some

28:06

of them will still be sort of around.

28:08

Lae-Anne-Liz Or maybe we'll revert it entirely to

28:11

being oral cultures again. Lae-Anne-Liz Liberty

28:13

has arrived, it may not stay. Lae-Anne-Liz

28:15

But if literacy doesn't stick around, then

28:17

one of my favorite proposals is

28:20

the breeding of so-called

28:22

radiation cats or ray cats.

28:24

Lae-Anne-Liz Mm-hmm. Lae-Anne-Liz Because we have had cats

28:26

for more than 10,000 years, we know

28:29

that. Lae-Anne-Liz That is true. Lae-Anne-Liz And

28:31

so if you bred a special type

28:33

of cats where they would change color

28:35

when they came near radioactive emissions, and

28:37

then you'd have

28:40

to transmit the message that if the

28:42

cat changes color, it's bad. Lae-Anne-Liz

28:44

Oh, you make a folk story out of

28:47

color-changing kitties which will be out there in

28:49

the world. Lae-Anne-Liz Right. Lae-Anne-Liz And hopefully that

28:51

story gets passed on along with the other

28:54

folk tales. Lae-Anne-Liz So you have to make

28:56

a fairy tale and myths and poetry and

28:58

music and painting about the dangers of color-changing

29:00

cats. And you have to get all of

29:03

the cats or many of the cats to

29:05

be color-changing, but people like cats. And

29:08

there was an episode of the podcast

29:10

99% Invisible where they commissioned a musician

29:13

to write a song about ray cats

29:15

for a 2014 episode about this,

29:18

which was called 10,000 Year

29:21

Worm to Discourage Settlement Near Nuclear Waste

29:23

Repositories, Don't Change Color Kitty, which is

29:25

supposed to be so catchy and annoying that it

29:28

might actually get handed down and stay

29:30

working. But I have to say, I have never

29:32

heard people sing this song in

29:34

a cultural folkloric sense, so

29:37

I don't know if they succeeded in having it

29:39

be transmitted even 10 years.

29:42

Lae-Anne-Liz But you know, I listened to that

29:44

episode many years ago and as soon as you

29:46

said color-changing kitties, I knew exactly what was happening,

29:49

even though I did not know nuclear semiotics. So

29:51

there you go. There might be

29:53

hope. Lae-Anne-Liz So maybe if it's a wacky enough

29:55

idea, people will keep talking about it because

29:57

it sounds so cool. Lae-Anne-Liz It's really good to

29:59

apply. in

30:02

addition to transmitting information about

30:04

how many stars are in

30:06

this particular constellation, this speaks

30:08

to the role of folklore and oral

30:11

cultures in shaping behaviour. Maybe

30:14

that's telling

30:16

people to not go near the colour-changing cats, but

30:19

also there's a whole bunch of asops

30:21

fables around things like jealousy or

30:23

things like ingenuity, various sort of

30:26

clever things that foxes do or things

30:28

like that. Those are ways of telling

30:30

people about appropriate

30:32

or inappropriate behaviour. Lae- I bet you're

30:34

going to tell me asops isn't real either. Lae-

30:37

Well, look, it

30:40

seems like the fables originally

30:42

were part of oral tradition

30:44

and were written

30:46

down about three centuries after asops

30:49

death. Lae- Okay, so like

30:52

the fact of feeling rather than the fact of truth,

30:54

I get it. Lae- I think at

30:56

that point, there were various things that once

30:58

you have asops fables as a template for

31:00

a certain type of morality story, you

31:03

can ascribe various other kinds of

31:05

stories and jokes and proverbs to him,

31:08

even though some of that is from earlier

31:10

than his period or is not

31:13

just strictly from the Greek cultural area. Lae-

31:15

And asops fables were usually animals

31:18

perform different actions and they have

31:20

moral consequences. It's actually a really

31:22

good teaching tool like teaching children

31:24

about cultural expectations around behaviour and

31:26

what counts as good behaviour and

31:28

what counts as rude behaviour. That's

31:31

really hard and having stories to

31:33

do that with rather than waiting

31:35

for them to make every possible

31:37

social mistake is a really great

31:39

cultural tool. Lae- And like a

31:41

lot of kids these days will buy their kid a

31:44

picture book about like here's the potty and why you

31:46

might want to use it or saying

31:48

thank you, it's important. Here's all the ways

31:50

we can say thank you to also try

31:52

to mould their kid's behaviour into some of

31:54

the things that are culturally important to us.

31:57

Lae- Yeah, it's why it's really fun to see different

32:00

morality stories across different cultures

32:02

as really interesting ways to see what

32:04

a particular culture value is. G- There's

32:06

an interesting story about Inuit

32:09

storytelling as used to discipline

32:11

or to train children into

32:13

things that are important. Obviously,

32:16

it's important for kids to

32:19

stay away and be careful around the ocean

32:21

where they could easily drown. Instead

32:25

of yelling at them, don't

32:27

go near the water, you can tell them a

32:29

story about a sea monster who is in the

32:31

water who could eat little children, which is a

32:34

little bit more vivid in terms

32:36

of the potential. L- It

32:38

certainly gets the point across. G- Yeah.

32:40

It's a bit more vivid than just saying, don't go

32:42

near the water, it's not safe to tell you, here's

32:44

this sort of fanciful story that the kid may

32:46

or may not completely believe in a literal

32:48

sense, but conveys this message of,

32:51

this is dangerous and don't do that.

32:54

L- We don't just have to tell children

32:56

stories to teach them lessons.

32:59

Society has a long tradition of

33:01

telling children stories at bedtime. G-

33:04

There's a really fun version of

33:06

this. Another epic poem that

33:08

was written down so early that

33:10

we don't know the original

33:12

poet's name is Beowulf in

33:14

the Old English tradition. In this

33:17

case, we don't even have a Homer

33:19

name even though we don't know anything about

33:22

Homer. Homer's name is ascribed

33:24

to this poem by tradition. In

33:26

the case of Beowulf, we just call this person the Beowulf

33:28

poet because we don't even know who wrote it

33:30

down or which exact people it passed

33:32

through, but it has many of these similar characteristics

33:34

in terms of having these formulaic

33:36

elements and these rhythmic elements that make

33:39

it easy to remember as a poem

33:41

and eventually get written down. L-

33:43

And it was written so early in the

33:45

history of English that we've even talked in

33:47

a previous episode about how there is a

33:50

modern translation of it into an English that

33:52

is more accessible to us today. G- Yeah,

33:54

there are many translations of it into various

33:56

different kinds and registers of modern English and at

33:58

the end of the book. time I was very

34:01

excited about the Maria Davena Headley

34:03

translation which begins with bro

34:05

to translate the what

34:08

word at the beginning which gets your attention. Other

34:11

people have also translated this word with things like

34:13

so and look or listen.

34:15

There's another new translation of this

34:17

poem which reimagines it

34:19

as a children's story where all

34:22

the characters are children and the

34:25

monster that comes and eats the warriors and

34:27

drags them back to his lair and so on is

34:29

instead a sort of grumpy old neighbor who

34:31

goes into the children's treehouse and makes them

34:34

grow up you know instantly into

34:36

boring adults. G Even

34:57

though we think of them as sort of high

34:59

culture and complicated and things actually

35:01

tell really well to children because children are still operating

35:03

under an oral culture in many cases because they haven't

35:05

learned how to read yet. L G

35:14

Right, like the skipping games

35:16

and the clapping games which

35:18

get transmitted by other children

35:26

and sometimes you meet someone from somewhere else and they've

35:28

got like a slightly different version of Ring Around the

35:30

Rosie. L Yeah, mine was Ring

35:33

Around the Rosie, a pocket full

35:35

of posy, a tissue a tissue, we all fall down. G

35:39

Mine was ashes, ashes we all fall down. L Oh,

35:42

there you go. I mean yours is obviously

35:44

incorrect but like good for you. G

35:48

We were transmitted different versions of those

35:51

rhymes but they have this you

35:53

know characteristic game of you know holding hands and

35:55

running around in a circle and falling down that

35:57

they go with even if parts of

36:00

it, especially though a little bit more

36:02

nonsensical parts got transmitted into something else

36:04

that felt a bit more sensical. So

36:06

how does the bail-off retelling raid? It

36:08

must be fun to read out loud.

36:11

It's really fun to read out loud. Here's the

36:13

first couple lines which go, hey, wait, listen

36:16

to the lives of the long ago kids, the

36:18

world fighters, the parent un-minding

36:20

kids, the improper, the politeness

36:23

proof, the unbowed bully crushers,

36:25

the bedtime breakers, the raspberry

36:27

blowers, fighters as sun killers, fearing

36:29

nothing, fated for fame. Oh,

36:32

so good. And I love

36:34

that it's doing the alliterative Anglo-Saxon

36:36

meter and it's doing all these

36:38

very old English compounds of

36:41

world fighters and bedtime breakers

36:43

and fun killers. But

36:45

still accessible. That's still accessible and playing with

36:47

the language but in a way that's still

36:50

available to kids. I recommended it to some of

36:52

my friends' kids and they said their five-year-old loved

36:54

it. Perfect. A lot

36:56

of highly literate people are untrained

36:59

in oral storytelling that personally having

37:01

something I can read to replicate

37:03

that experience is really reassuring for

37:05

me as a limited

37:07

capacity literate person here. I

37:11

also think it's neat because

37:13

children's stories are trying to do

37:16

two different things. And

37:19

one of those is create

37:21

pre-literate and early literate and proto-literate

37:24

children by giving them these books

37:26

with relatively simple language and

37:28

words that are relatively phonetically spelled, especially

37:30

for English which is not very phonetically spelled all

37:33

the time, and trying to give them something that

37:35

they might be able to read by themselves relatively

37:37

early on. And then

37:39

simultaneously, these kids are quite

37:41

sophisticated language users in the oral domain

37:44

and so giving them texts

37:46

that are very dense and rich

37:48

and have a lot going on and aren't simple

37:50

texts that they could read by themselves but

37:52

let them engage with that level

37:55

of oral language that they already have

37:57

is this sort of other thing that kills

37:59

them. storytelling can also do. And a

38:02

lot of these stories were

38:04

either told, you know, fairy tales are

38:06

traditionally told to children, but

38:08

also are traditionally told to

38:10

mixed audiences, including both adults

38:12

and children. And so

38:15

it's interesting to see that more explicitly brought back.

38:17

It's interesting when you look across things

38:20

like Beowulf and the stories of Moindo

38:22

and the stories that we have from

38:24

the Homeric epics. You see, as

38:27

there is in this on-book, all of these

38:29

features of particularly oral storytelling, that it doesn't

38:31

have to be beginning to end,

38:33

it doesn't have to always be exactly the

38:35

same every time. And it's these features that make

38:38

you realize what a weird genre

38:40

the idea of like narrative

38:43

fiction in book form is. And

38:45

again, how literacy has created this

38:47

weird layer over the top of

38:50

human storytelling. And it

38:52

took hundreds of years of literacy

38:54

for someone to invent the novel.

38:57

Right? Like poetry is much older than

38:59

the novel. And sort of diary

39:02

or memoir or here's my life story

39:04

is much older than the novel. But the

39:06

idea that an author can sort of see

39:08

into characters brains and tell you what they're

39:10

thinking and tell you what a bunch of

39:12

people are thinking, but in this very sort

39:15

of psychoanalytic way, and in a way that

39:17

is sort of linked together. And one of

39:19

the points that I thought was interesting that

39:21

Ong makes in the book

39:23

is that many of the early

39:25

novelists were women, perhaps

39:28

even because they were educated enough

39:30

to be literate, but not educated

39:33

in the, what he calls residually

39:35

oral classical tradition that

39:37

the men were being educated in at the

39:39

time. So they were more willing to look

39:42

at writing as its own medium,

39:44

and to see what writing

39:46

could be capable of that wasn't

39:48

trying to like learn Latin and

39:51

study Greek rhetoric, or in the

39:53

case of Murasaki writing the first

39:55

novel in Japanese, learning as

39:57

much of the classical tradition that

39:59

was still bound up in this rhetorical history

40:02

of trying to learn these very

40:04

formal and stylized and performative types

40:06

of stories. Lae Yeah, we talked

40:08

about Murasaki's Tale of Genji in our translation

40:10

episode as well. And that was kind of written

40:13

and then no one paid attention to it

40:15

for literally hundreds of years. It's like a

40:17

millennium old. Gae It was very popular at the

40:19

time. Lae Yeah, just like kind of written

40:21

for her friends, we think. It's

40:24

all very opaque. What the kind of context

40:26

of that being created was in fiction for

40:28

a long time was not taken seriously as

40:30

a written art form. It was all about

40:33

the oral storytelling in cultures that are now

40:35

very book story focused. Gae

40:37

Right. And you have Jane Austen sort of inventing

40:39

the what we can think of as the modern novel,

40:42

at least in English speaking cultures. And yeah,

40:44

some of these early novel

40:46

writers not being educated as

40:48

much in this classical rhetorical tradition. Lae

40:51

Fascinating. I've never really thought about it before,

40:53

but it's an interesting observation. Gae

40:55

One thing that I will say that I disagree

40:57

with so August writing this book, which is very

40:59

interesting in 1982 and our thoughts on some things

41:03

have changed since 1982. Lae

41:05

Right. Okay. And one of the

41:07

points that oral culture people who

41:09

are sort of newly encountering writing

41:11

make and like Plato has

41:14

Socrates make this point when he's

41:16

writing down Socrates speeches, because this

41:18

was also a sort of early

41:20

transition from oral to written culture,

41:22

is that when you have a person

41:25

telling you something, that person can be

41:27

asked questions and can be interrogated, can

41:30

answer and be held to

41:32

account for the story that they're telling you,

41:34

you can ask them how they know things. When

41:37

you have a written book, you are

41:40

just forced to take the writers thoughts

41:42

and opinions on their say so at this

41:45

one snapshot of the time that they've written

41:47

them down. And you don't have

41:49

the living person there to ask questions of. And

41:51

so we sort of think as

41:53

very literate culture people that the book is

41:55

like the better version, but not

41:57

actually having access to the person is both. a

42:00

plus because it can live on

42:03

beyond them and also a downside

42:05

because their thoughts might have changed

42:07

and you don't have a way of knowing that

42:09

when all you have is a record from one period of

42:11

time. Which is to say

42:13

that the Ong book is not

42:15

great about sign languages by which I mean

42:17

it just really doesn't include or look at

42:20

them. Yeah and

42:23

charitably I'm going to say that the research

42:25

has come a long way since 1982 when it

42:27

was published and you know Ong's dead

42:29

now so we don't know what he thought in more

42:31

recent times but what the

42:34

sign language research does show

42:36

is that even though orality

42:39

and oral cultures is this term that's based

42:41

on you know the mouth and the voice

42:44

the cultural phenomena that

42:46

we now attach to that word are

42:49

very much features of signed language

42:51

cultures and deaf cultures as well. We

42:54

have that great interview with Gab

42:56

Hodge where she told us all

42:58

about the amazing resources that deaf

43:00

people have for storytelling in signed

43:02

languages particularly Auslan and BSL that

43:04

she works in. And

43:07

I also came across a very

43:09

interesting discussion from a listserv

43:12

from 1993. Oh my

43:14

gosh how did you manage that we couldn't even

43:16

go back to DMs from five years ago. This

43:19

got archived as a PDF from the

43:22

Orchard listserv the Center for

43:24

Studies and Oral Tradition. Amazing. And there's

43:27

an electronic conversation on deafness and orality that

43:29

got preserved in this very very written culture

43:32

way because I was able to go back

43:34

and read what people were

43:36

writing in 1993 and it's slightly edited

43:38

to add little footnotes about like this is an

43:40

emoticon here's what an emoticon is because maybe in 1993

43:42

you don't know that. Okay

43:46

what is in this

43:48

listserv conversation? There's

43:50

a lot of really good commentary from

43:52

Lois Bragg who was a deaf professor

43:54

at Gallaudet University who was

43:56

talking about the deaf community doing oral

43:59

culture and it was very clear that

44:01

this is something that she thinks applies

44:03

to the deaf community and that

44:06

there is a lot of narrative

44:08

that is epic and legendary and

44:10

somewhat historical or autobiographical and it

44:12

tends to be quite stylized. This

44:14

is what she thought of as

44:16

characteristic of deaf culture. There's a

44:18

lot of storytelling and plays and

44:20

poems and wordplay and things like

44:22

that. There was some discussion with

44:25

both Lois Bragg and Stephanie Hall,

44:27

and this is in 1993 that

44:29

deafness is in this unique situation

44:32

regarding literacy because there isn't

44:34

the one widely

44:36

used way of writing sign language that

44:39

lots of deaf people use, although there's

44:41

a variety of systems that researchers and

44:43

various people use experimentally. This is still

44:46

an oral culture that has maybe

44:49

a relationship to English as

44:51

a literate culture that's kind

44:53

of like the Anglo-Saxons who

44:55

were going home and speaking Old English to each

44:58

other and learning to read and write

45:00

in Latin, which is a completely different language just to

45:02

access the technology of writing. So

45:05

even though deaf people can learn to read in English

45:07

or another oral language that has a written tradition, there

45:10

isn't a sort of endogenous way

45:12

of writing signed languages that's widely

45:14

accepted. Lae-Ann One bit of

45:16

oral tradition that I love that's kind

45:18

of at the opposite end of the

45:21

scale from remembering a full epic. Maybe

45:23

this is just because of my terrible

45:25

literate person memory, but I love the

45:28

oral tradition of memorable units, of

45:31

small sayings that

45:33

everyone remembers and get embedded

45:35

into your reflexive response to

45:37

things. So things like

45:40

a stitch in time saves nine,

45:42

and you have to learn what that means,

45:45

but you get told it a whole bunch and then you

45:47

learn what it means and then you say it to people

45:49

when they want to put off doing something that needs doing.

45:51

G Lae

46:00

Nae. Lae Nae Ah. I have it as Red's

46:02

Guy at Night Shepherd's Delight. Lae

46:04

Nae Well, you see, I grew up on the coast.

46:06

Lae Nae That's your maritime culture coming through. Lae Nae

46:08

Yeah. Lae Nae My pastoralist culture coming through there. Lae

46:11

Nae Or measure twice cut once, a bird in the

46:14

hand is worth two in the bush. Lae Nae You

46:16

can lead a horse to water, but you can't

46:18

make it drink. Lae Nae Mm. Lae Nae I

46:20

was about to say they rhyme often or are alliterative

46:22

and that one doesn't, but still sticks

46:24

in my mind. Lae Nae Yeah, they've got

46:26

a certain sort of metrical quality to them

46:29

like the longer poems and we've retained the

46:31

sort of shorter, proverb-y bits

46:33

of memorable units. I was thinking

46:35

about when I was reading the

46:37

Ong book and he talks a lot

46:39

about residual orality even in cultures that

46:42

are primarily literate. And

46:45

I have an example in my own life

46:47

about a thing that I did

46:49

that was part of oral culture. I worked

46:51

as a tour guide at a summer job and

46:54

we had a half hour guided tour of

46:56

the museum that the various tour guides would

46:58

give the sort of the same way. And

47:01

once I had been working there for

47:03

a few months, I had certain jokes

47:05

and anecdotes and beats that I knew

47:08

things that would work as laugh lines and things that were

47:10

sort of more serious and sort of ways to get

47:12

from the serious bits to the funnier bits and not

47:15

just sort of have sudden

47:17

transitions there. And

47:19

I had the memory of which bits that I

47:21

said at which parts of the tour keyed

47:24

to different locations along the route within

47:26

the museum, which is a

47:28

very long-standing memory technique. And

47:32

I learned to do that tour in

47:34

an oral culture way by watching

47:36

some other people's guided tours and then they said, okay,

47:38

you can probably do one now. And

47:43

one time I saw a script of the

47:45

guided tour written out and it just felt

47:47

weird. Like it felt flat

47:49

and it didn't have the jokes in it the

47:51

same way. It didn't have the delivery and

47:54

some of our tour guides would try to learn

47:56

it from the written script and it just didn't

47:58

feel like it was. the

48:00

tour the way it existed in this more

48:03

fully featured and three-dimensional and

48:06

located in time and space version as

48:09

it was in my mind. And you

48:11

might not always give the tour exactly the same

48:13

way twice but you were probably paying attention to

48:15

like oh this is a an audience

48:17

that really likes the emotional bit so I'm

48:19

gonna maybe tone down the jokes or I'm

48:21

gonna move through this bit quickly you can

48:23

really react to the moment. Right

48:26

or these people are you know giving me lots of laughs

48:28

so I'm gonna be even jokeier and I would

48:30

have you know versions that I would do with

48:32

seniors or with kids that would be a little

48:34

bit different but yeah it felt like it was

48:36

this very oral object that I hadn't

48:39

realized that I had that part of oral culture

48:41

in my memory. And the other

48:44

thing that I thought about when I was reading

48:46

this Walter J. Ong book and which made me

48:48

wish that I had read it before I wrote

48:50

Because Internet but you know a book is a

48:53

snapshot of a moment in time. Oh

48:55

it's not an oral saga that you

48:57

can update depending on the season. I

48:59

can't just update it so

49:01

I'm doing the updating in our oral saga

49:03

of the podcast which

49:06

is thinking about the

49:08

relationship of internet memes

49:11

to oral culture because

49:13

in oral culture the only

49:15

things that get transmitted are

49:17

things that have been put into

49:19

a form that is memorable. Yeah.

49:22

So proverbs like red sky at

49:25

night sailors delight. You can substitute

49:27

sailor for shepherd because they have the same

49:29

number of syllables and it still works but

49:31

if you try to say red sky at

49:33

night sailors enjoyment that

49:36

one doesn't get remembered the same way. And

49:39

at some point someone sat down and explained to me

49:41

you know the reason we say this is because where

49:44

the Sun is reflecting off the sky at

49:46

the sunset or the sunrise reflects what's happening

49:48

with the clouds and that gives you some

49:50

indication of what might happen with precipitation later

49:53

on that day like sure that's

49:55

an explanation but it's not as catchy. Yeah

49:58

and weather tends to move from West to east. because

50:00

of the rotation of the earth and all various

50:02

things like that. But it's the

50:04

mnemonic red sky at night sailors light that sticks

50:06

with you in your brain and you have to

50:09

preserve that mnemonic in a form that

50:11

is memorable and that is pass

50:14

aroundable. And if you say something

50:16

like red sky at night saves nine, you

50:19

can lead a horse to water but it's worth two in

50:21

the bush. These

50:24

are sort of silly playful things that

50:26

we can do because we have

50:28

that memory of them. But memes

50:31

are not oral

50:34

culture in that sticky

50:36

mnemonic way. Yeah, the thing

50:38

that enables memes is being

50:41

able to Google them and

50:43

the thing that enables the tremendous proliferation of

50:45

memes and there are so many of them.

50:47

Like the early stages of memes were more

50:49

oral. Like I Can Has Cheeseburger was just

50:51

the same image that kept getting repeated in

50:53

a whole bunch of contexts. Yeah. Whereas now

50:55

you have a template of a meme that's

50:57

like the distracted boyfriend meme where you have

50:59

like the guy and he's looking at the

51:01

one girl the other girls looking at him

51:03

and you can put a whole bunch of

51:05

different labels on that. And because you can

51:07

search for the template and you can search

51:09

for the name and you can see a

51:11

whole bunch of people making their riffs and then

51:14

you make your own riff and sort of

51:16

prizes originality and riffing off of it. Like

51:18

when I see a new meme that's been going around sometimes

51:20

I look it up where I read like the meme explainer

51:23

of like here's what it is from

51:25

like Vox or somebody. You have to

51:27

work backwards and that's been five minutes

51:29

not 500 years. Right and the

51:31

fact that there are all these sort of templates and

51:34

variants that we make of the memes rather than sort

51:36

of repeating the same really sticky one. That's

51:38

actually a very written culture phenomenon that there's

51:41

lots of different versions and edits and

51:44

meta-commentaries. Whereas

51:46

having something that's more sticky that just

51:48

gets repeated is a

51:51

more oral culture thing. So sometimes people

51:53

try to say that memes are oral

51:55

culture because they're pointing at something but

51:57

what they're actually pointing at is that memes are like an extreme

51:59

of written culture rather than an extreme of

52:01

oral culture, which is like they are a cultural

52:04

shift, but they're a cultural shift in the opposite

52:06

direction that people typically say. I wish

52:08

I'd been able to put that in because internet, but here's the updated

52:11

version. Lae-Anne-Liz

52:13

This episode has really once again

52:15

hammered home how unusual in the

52:17

course of human history written literacy

52:19

is and how

52:22

amazing and creative and powerful

52:24

and how much of

52:26

a skill oral literacy is. Lae-Anne-Liz

52:29

And it's hard for us to

52:31

even talk about oral literacy or

52:33

oral literature without using metaphors brought

52:36

in from literate culture. Lae-Anne-Liz

52:38

Yeah. Lae-Anne-Liz And even when we

52:40

try to project our memory of

52:43

what it could have been like to not be

52:45

literate, we had that bringing in a bunch of

52:47

our literate assumptions and people

52:49

doing the sort of detailed ethnography and

52:52

record keeping of

52:54

oral cultures help us

52:56

disturb some of those and understand more

52:58

deeply a very

53:00

old and also still present way to be

53:02

human. Lae-Anne-Liz

53:07

For more

53:10

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