I'm going to digress for a moment into personal history. I took elocution lessons--yes, I know, how pretentious--from the time I was six until I was twelve. So did nearly all of the upper-middle-class children in my home town at the time. We spent an hour a week in the studio in Mrs. Page's basement, where we recited bad poetry that we had memorized between lessons. (I still know too much Emiliy Dickenson, and this ridiculous poem that begins "Henry Horton Humberdickle/Spent a dime and saved a nickel..." as a result.) There was no hidden agenda here: our parents were very clear that we went to these lessons so we wouldn't pick up the speech patterns associated with southern West Virginia. The class distinction between people who spoke heavily accented English, and those who did not, was explicitly acknowledged.
I find myself particularly aware of this as an English 101 instructor. It is, largely, my job to teach students to turn their authentic, spoken speech into a more rule-bound, formalized version of English that will allow them to pass the higher-level courses in their individual majors. Last semester, I could hear certain phrases dropping out of usage as we discussed their grammatical "flaws." For instance, by the end of last semester, at least two of my students had stopped speaking the very Appalachian phrasing in which the verb "needs" is used instead of construction "needs to be" and the gerund form is applied to the modifier. (As in, "My dog needs walking," or "this blog post needs revising.")
So, I suppose my question would be: What is the value of preserving a way of speaking that acts as a negative social marker for the speaker? What is the epistimological cost of creating a constructed version of a person's first language and privelaging it above the traditional, spoken version?
Second Question: Stenre writes, "At the most basic level, sound-reproduction technologies presumed some kind of social network, a cooridination of people an actions over time and space; they were partial machiens that, from the outset, depended on the presence of possibilty of other machines." This reminded me of Sandy's assertion that, really, in Ong's analysis, things like Facebook would be speech rather than text. My question is, then, looking over Ong and Sterne both, what is the liminal role that "ephemeral text" plays in briding the gap between the two sorts of language? And is this ephemeral text--which exists for a longer time than a spoken word, but a shorter time usually than a recorded one--a new thing, or can we find an analogously temporary form of writing elsewhere?
At the end of your question: Is there a language that we speak that is not the result of elecution lessons? Isn't our "mother tongue" the first lesson, perhaps the "closest" but perhaps this only because the first? And yet, isn't this very notion of different modes of speaking a part of rationalism - the effort to make us calculable? Perhaps we all only speak one way and it gets calculated variously?
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