Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word - Monoskop

128 ORALITY AND LITERACY
Print established the climate in which dictionaries grew. From
their origins in the eighteenth century until the past few decades,
dictionaries of English have commonly taken as their norm for
language only the usage of writers producing text for print (and not
quite all of them). The usage of all others, if it deviates from this
typographic usage, has been regarded as ‘corrupt’. Webster’s Third
New International Dictionary (1961) was the first major
lexicographical work to break cleanly with this old typographical
convention and to cite as sources for usage persons not writing for
print—and of course many persons, formed in the old ideology,
immediately wrote off this impressive lexicographical achievement
(Dykema 1963) as a betrayal of the ‘true’ or ‘pure’ language.
Print was also a major factor in the development of the sense of
personal privacy that marks modern society. It produced books
smaller and more portable than those common in a manuscript
culture, setting the stage psychologically for solo reading in a quiet
corner, and eventually for completely silent reading. In manuscript
culture and hence in early print culture, reading had tended to be a
social activity, one person reading to others in a group. As Steiner
(1967, p. 383) has suggested, private reading demands a home
spacious enough to provide for individual isolation and quiet.
(Teachers of children from poverty areas today are acutely aware
that often the major reason for poor performance is that there is
nowhere in a crowded house where a boy or girl can study
effectively.)
Print created a new sense of the private ownership of words.
Persons in a primary oral culture can entertain some sense of
proprietary rights to a poem, but such a sense is rare and
ordinarily enfeebled by the common share of lore, formulas, and
themes on which everyone draws. With writing, resentment at
plagiarism begins to develop. The ancient Latin poet Martial (i. 53.
9) uses the word plagiarius, a torturer, plunderer, oppressor, for
someone who appropriates another’s writing. But there is no
special Latin word with the exclusive meaning of plagiarist or
plagiarism. The oral commonplace tradition was still strong. In the
very early days of print, however, a royal decree or privilegium
was often secured forbidding the reprinting of a printed book by
others than the original publisher. Richard Pynson secured such a
privilegium in 1518 from Henry VIII. In 1557 the Stationers’
Company was incorporated in London to oversee authors’ and
printers’ or printer-publishers’ rights, and by the eighteenth