Textual Soundbites

... we call those, "quotes."

"This could have been a toot, Greg!" should really become the quote of the Mastodon Era. We're progressing towards shorter and shorter communications, so we need to make those communications really information-dense. In a way, we're coming a full circle.

When it was hard to even convey a concept, we thought long and hard about hunter signs we left for others. (Would a big smilodon scratched onto a boulder be enough? Maybe add a reclined hominid with one arm tor... No, that might seem like the beginning of a campfire tale, better just a picture of a big cat.)

Then came millennia of slightly more relaxed times. We had a much better spoken language (where this come from? Myself not know how this "language" come from. One minute we scream and point, next minute we say "OMG! A smilodon! Run!" Hmmm, and now me confused, WTF is "minute?" Language hard.) and could just say "OMG! A smilodon! Run!" 

Perhaps scratchings on rocks and ochre drawings got made smaller because we suddenly had more concepts to express, and became pictographic, logographic, ideographic, alphabetic. Some, like runes and hieroglyphs, could convey several layers of contextual meaning. 

As urgency declined (we had kraals, caves, stone and wood houses to give us some leisure to write something longer than "OMG! A Smilodon! Run!" and chisel that into the rock where some Old One had hastily scratched an almost-complete smilodon - wonder why they stopped so suddenly? Hmmm, an Ancient Mystery I guess.) we got better at turning ideas and concepts into physically recordable language. 

Also, now that we had that communication tool we had a way to use some of the new-found safe time and space we'd built around us. We could suddenly record anything. Diary stuff. Observations. Speculations. ("Smilodon was big deal to Old Ones. We have spears and walls now, not so big problem now. Maybe one day will be a big, flying smilodon that breathe fire and not look like smilodon but maybe snake or crocodile? Better try to see what can be done to appease such powerful godlike thing. (Now again - wtf does this thing - God - come from into my thinking?) Anyway - now ME am dat hominid dat can appease this deity, so you pay me to make it stop." OMG! Have me invent "money?")

That Was A Long Intro Ted.

It was. 

And it kind of had to be. Because that era led to an era where - eventually - people were able to record thoughts on clay and papyrus and vellum and hides, carved into stone and wood, then paper and ink, and now, as patterns of electrons in a matrix, dots on a screen. 

In that latter period we began to progress because while painstaking and slow, written knowledge could be copied and disseminated for the first time rather than having to travel to wherever the original document / rock /whatever was housed.

The art of the quote would happened around this time too. If you wanted to impress your reader (and if you were someone with the knowledge to read and write, you were in a tiny group and probably would only have one or two other readers. Unless your output was deemed important enough to be copied by scribes) with your knowledge, it would never hurt to refer to another document and use that as part of your work. 

Then we got Gutenberg and his famous press, and so knowledge that was once only available to the small number of people that had access to the original manuscript or who could afford to have a scribe take it out of circulation for a year while they copied it, had access to that knowledge. The bible became the most influential book of its time for a reason - it was all Gutenberg produced, it was why he made the press in the first place. Quite simply, it flooded the market, and proved that mass propaganda worked. 

Once we moved to having many presses rather than just one or two, other classic books were published. THIS was the beginning of wider penetration of education and science to more and more people, exposure of more and more minds to research and philosophy and all those esoteric teachings. It's no coincidence that our knowledge started increasing exponentially. So for a while, there was the bible and there were scientific treatises and texts. It's also no coincidence that churches started becoming influential and wealthy. 

Among other things, quotes became a thing. The bible is full of quotable sections. And those of the church used them as central to their sermons.

Pullquote:

The word "sermon" comes from the Old French word "sermun", which in turn comes from the Latin word "sermo", meaning "discourse" or "speech". The Latin word "sermo" was used in Christian writings to refer to a religious discourse or instruction, and it is from this usage that the modern English word "sermon" ultimately derives.

The term "sermo" itself is believed to have originally come from the Proto-Indo-European root *swer-, which means "to speak" or "to say". This root has given rise to many other words in various Indo-European languages, including "word" in English, "Wort" in German, "verbum" in Latin, "parole" in French, and "слово" (slovo) in Russian.

In Christianity, a sermon is typically a speech or discourse delivered by a religious leader, such as a priest, pastor, or minister, to a congregation during a religious service. The purpose of a sermon is to offer guidance, inspiration, and moral instruction to the listeners, and to help them better understand the teachings and principles of the religion.

-- my research notes on the word, 21 Feb 2023

Basically, a part of the bible was used to form the core of a discourse the priest was having with the congregation. Parlay! And it introduces another thing, the quote turned into a thing that was only possible with movable type printing presses, the pullquote. That was so called because a quote from another source would be set (usually in slightly different typeface and larger size) as a paragraph and then "pulled" to the right to indent it. And THAT is something I didn't know until I started to write this article, and I've been a typesetter, sub-editor, and ghostwriter for a country newspaper for a time.

But all of that was just to introduce another thought: If you want to get widely parlayed ("to increase or otherwise transform into something of much greater value" -- Merriam-Webster https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/parlay) into general usage and recognition then it needs to include some memorable quotes.

You'll note that all of this relates to words, communication. And that's it - to gain widespread traction, you need to have something people will find insightful or clever enough to quote from, or to reprint, as it were. And these days, those things have become synomymous with "Like & Share" (Which - yep - is a hint to share the URL if you enjoyed this article... 😸)

Combined with the steadily-shortening attention span we're developing from the !!BAM!! attention-grabbing styles made popular in TV commercials, and perfected by Tiktok and short form video formats, you need a good quote in each article. I think the take-away quote from this post is 

"The rise of the textual soundbite"

Because what I want most from writing these posts is for you to find something quotable / shareable and go ahead and share it. And I'm still trying to work out what the magic sauce is that makes for a good quote.

Or just Chat with me on Mastodon >>