Speech
Related: freedom of speech (censorship) - conversation - saying - spoken word (poetry) - expression
Fiction with speaking body parts: Naked Lunch (1959) - William S. Burroughs - The Indiscreet Jewels (1748) - Denis Diderot
"What can be said at all can be said clearly; and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence." --Ludwig Wittgenstein in Tractatus Logico Philosophicus (1921)
Graphocentrism
The bias in which writing is privileged over speech has been called graphocentrism or scriptism. In many literate cultures, text has a higher status than speech: written language is often seen as the standard. Until the early twentieth century, linguists tended to accord priority to written language over speech: grammatical rules were based on written language and everyday speech was largely ignored; the prescriptive tradition was based on the written word. Marshall McLuhan, using James Joyce's coinage, referred to 'ABCEDmindedness' - an unconscious bias which he regarded as 'the psychological effect of literacy' (in McNamara 1970, p. 8). McLuhan emphasizes print in particular, declaring that 'print... is a transforming and metamorphosing drug that has the power of imposing its assumptions upon every level of consciousness' (in McNamara 1969, p. 175). It reflects a scriptist bias to refer, as many scholars do, to 'oral literature', or to any semiotic systems, written or not, as a 'text'. --Daniel Chandler in http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/litoral/litoral3.htmlThe speed of speech (media theory)
Since the eye perceives more swiftly than the hand can draw, the process of pictorial reproduction was accelerated so enormously that it could keep pace with speech. A film operator shooting a scene in the studio captures the images at the speed of an actor's speech. Just as lithography virtually implied the illustrated newspaper, so did photography foreshadow the sound film. For the first time in the process of pictorial reproduction, photography freed the hand of the most important artistic functions which henceforth devolved only upon the eye looking into a lens. --Walter Benjamin, Walter Benjamin - The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction [Amazon US]I Have a Dream [...]
See entry for Martin Luther King Jr.
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