[HPFGU-OTChatter] Re: oral traditions

[Jen Faulkner]

On Tue, 15 May 2001, Tandy, Heidi wrote:

> I am sure that there are people who know entire stories by heart - it's
> really not so hard to do, especially if you don't have to get the exact
> words in the same places every time - as long as you stick to the regular
> script.

Exactly.  It's really not that hard to learn by heart things that you've
heard aurally/orally, whether it be movies, plays, stories that were
read to you, or things performed by a storyteller.  Conscious effort
isn't usually required.  Even in such a text-based culture as our own,
most of us actually know quite a few things from memory -- everything
from commercial jingles to the Pledge of Allegiance (for those who
attended American public schools).

Music or poetry in meter is even easier to memorize than prose; meter
serves a mnemonic function, one that is well-exploited by traditional
oral cultures, but not completely abandoned by ours.  Personally, I
always found baffling the suggestion by a choral director I studied
under in college that choir members should memorize the lyrics
separately from the music; it seemed to me much, MUCH more difficult to
do (I never could, and would, if called on, let the pieces 'sing
through' in my head to produce the lyrics rather than trying to ever
think of them separately...  Other than this one thing, though, she was
a fabulous director, whom I learned an amazing amount from....).  The
additional structure of melody and rhythm, or of meter and/or rhyme (or
allitteration, or what have you) in poetry, makes memorization much
simpler.  I suspect that's true even for those whose main way of
memorizing is visual rather than oral/aural.

I'm terrible at visual memorization.  I never remember details about
things I've seen, I have trouble recognizing people I don't know well
(and sometimes even people I do know well, if they alter their
appearance enough), I can't memorize grammar paradigms without reciting
them out loud...  But by heart I know lots of bits of poetry, all of the
lines to a ton of children's movies, probably, if I were really to start
counting, the words and music to thousands of songs or other pieces of
music, all the lines to some other movies (Star Wars, Wayne's World,
Princess Bride, most of Casablanca, most of MP's Holy Grail)...

But of course, HP, which I've only read to myself (silently) and never
heard, unlike most others here, I can't give a single sentence from by
memory.

--jen, HP-deficient. :)

* * * * * * 
Jen's fics (and other cool stuff):
http://www.eden.rutgers.edu/~jfaulkne/
Snapeslash listmom: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/snapeslash/
Yes, I *am* the Deictrix.