Words, words, words...

[libertango]

I must admit I'm a bit confused by the "it's just his oratory" meme that circulates about Obama.

Thoughts occur in words. If you can't speak well, that frequently (though not always) implies you can't think well.

By this argument, one could say Cato, Cicero, Lincoln, Churchill, and Reagan -- conservative icons all -- gained their status through "just their oratory."

For a criticism about the lack of substance, it's remarkably insubstantial.

Comments

[farmgirl1146.livejournal.com]

What else can the Repubs say? The Dems have oratory and the Repubs have blather.

[notthebuddha.livejournal.com]

Thoughts occur in words.

That's essentially the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, now largely out of favor. The simplest counterexamples are the coinage of new words and "it's on the tip of my tongue" occasions where the word for the item has been forgotten, but obviously the person is still thinking of something.

That being said, charisma can largely fill the gap bewteen words and thought in one-directional communication. Unlike the first four, Reagan was known almost solely through performances of material written completely or largely by others, and did almost no original writing to be read. He was able to be caught out on press questions like his uneven stand on personal freedoms issues, despite being able to speak persuasively for and against individual ones like drug use and helmet laws.

Epistomology

[hal-obrien.livejournal.com]

"That's essentially the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, now largely out of favor."

Such a thing is both unknown, and very probably unknowable, for the reason implied by Kinsey. That is, given six billion plus possible data points, and the extremely small sample sizes of any possible study, combined with the great variation in the human animal... Well, yeah. "...(H)e hadn't really seen enough specimens to generalize."

I can say that I think this way, that I am sufficiently what McLuhan called, "typographical man," that I think overhwelmingly in words, even when thinking about images. That is, when I think of an image, there's also a running commentary in my head, and concurrent with that commentary I see the words. If it comes to that, when I hear conversations, or watch movies, or read, or whathaveyou, I again see the text at some level.

I've always seen nominal aphasia as more of a mental stutter, than anything else. I can't speak to word creation, other than to note the number of times new words are old words misheard and reassembled, or built from older words as a portmanteau, or... well, either you get the idea, or you don't.

My experience may well not be generalizable. I am not so full of myself, though, to think it's unique, either.

Now, I could have written all this as a footnote to my original statement. But, having been critiqued earlier this week for putting too many qualifiers to my statements, and doing such footnoting too often, I decided to write as simply as I could.

So, yes... You are technically correct. But it's in such a way to both be irrelevant without vast digression, and it misses my larger point entirely.

To cop the punchline of a well-known joke, I don't suppose you work for Microsoft?

Re: Epistomology

[notthebuddha.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure what your larger point is, but if it depends on the assertion that everyone or even most people think the way that one person does, it's pretty suspect. Could you rephrase it some way that doesn't depend on political speakers' streams of consciousness?

As for your own thought-word processes, how many of them have you examined closely? Do you, for example, have a lexical construction unique to every differentiable hue and shade? If you do, how many are there and how did you learn them? If not, how are you able to tell them apart? When tested, most people can't name more than a few dozen colors but can non-verbally match and discriminate between thousands.

Re: Epistomology

[(Anonymous)]

My original statement was, "If you can't speak well, that frequently (though not always) implies you can't think well."

Let's just say that I am a proof by example, since I clearly can neither write nor think in a way that's useful.

Re: Epistomology

[notthebuddha.livejournal.com]

I can agree with that original statement, but I was getting the sense that you were trying to make the converse point, that speaking well associates with thinking well.

I'm also trying to improve the way I express myself, though there are important differences between speaking and writing that make the process harder than it could be.

Re: Epistomology

[hal-obrien.livejournal.com]

Sorry, the anonymous comment was by me -- which only further demonstrates what I just wrote.

Re: Epistomology

[notthebuddha.livejournal.com]

salright