TurkeyHeads: Turkey Scratch

Oh woe to the world, we won’t read. It’s the end of us. It’s the great tragedy. People would rather watch television, play computer games, or listen to their IPODs.

Poor us. We’re missing out on SO MUCH. It’s a whole different world in books. They can TAKE you places. FAR AWAY places. Romantic, idealistic, fantastic places. And we NEED to go there. ‘Cause this place stinks.

So we read. You know – writing. The act of putting down symbols so that they can be interpreted by others for informational or recreational purposes. We’ve been doing it ever since man could etch a picture of naked woman into his cave.

Wait a minute. That’s a picture. That’s not writing. Writing is letters. Letters are symbols. Symbols are images. Images are… oh, pictures.

Letters are symbols of phonemes representing parts of speech, WHICH IS WHERE LANGUAGE CAME FROM. Speech. We weren’t writing before we were talking. Everything started ORALLY. (Stop snickering Beavis.)

So I guess some time around 1450 (look it up), everyone started crying and whining about how we’re going to lose the oral tradition, only it wasn’t a tradition then. Oh no! they’d cry. Everyone’s doing this READING thing, and no one’s telling stories any more. No one’s TALKING. No one is RECITING. It’s the end of us.

We DID lose a lot of things, then. We lost memory. Didn’t need it as much. We lost respect for the elders. Since we had everything down on paper, didn’t need to consult them as much. Anybody want to go back?

But we GAINED the ability for ANYONE to look something up, educate themselves, and spread information. Sound familiar? Like the internet?

So we got writing hanging around for a couple millennia and printing for about 6 centuries. Symbols. Some of those symbols are bad. If you organize symbols to create the following set – FUCK – you could get into a lot of trouble. It’s not so bad if you write F*CK, though. So it must be the U that’s all the trouble.

Thing is, the symbols are ARBITRARY. One day, some guy came up with the idea for a symbol for the sound you make when you stick your hand in mud. Some people went EWW and other went UHH. One symbol. U. It could have been anything. 4 or & or #. But he went with U.

Then some other guy comes up with an arrangement to express his idea of intercourse. Only he came up with FIKKEN or FUKKEN (meaning to stick or stab) or something like that. Didn’t matter. WE knew what he meant. It’s the MEANING that’s so important. We assign a word to a meaning and we assigned letters to the word.

Good thing we have * around to fool people.

And now we’re heading INTO THE FUTURE. We don’t NEED words any more. We really don’t. We have ICONS. And ICONS are – oh, symbols. We have TV. TV is made up of images and sounds, which are also… symbols.

One day, a couple of centuries from now, when the new thing comes along, and all the younger generation start doing it, parents will be begging their kids to STAY HOME AND WATCH TV. They’ll cry and moan that we’re losing an art. It’s the END of US, they’d say.

Well, don’t worry. For those of you who still like reading, and for those of you who think this essay isn’t literate enough: a poem.

If Oliver Stone was a phone
He would play his own ring tone