Some provocative things in Ong's chapter 5, "Print, Space, and Closure"
Ong notes on page 116 that in a manuscript culture "the letters used in writing do not exist before the text in which they occur." But, with the advent of the printing press and the culture that ensued, "words are made out of units (types) which pre-exist as units before the words which they will constitute".
Continuing on, Ong says on page 119 that "print locks words into position in [this] space. Control of position is everything in print." So, essentially, in print, letters come before the words and are locked into place. These are only two points chosen out of the infinite of chapter 5, but I would like to illustrate how we apply these ideas in everyday life.
There was a recent Simpsons episode in which Lisa discovered she was a "cruciverbalist", or a crossword enthusiast. She shared this love with her grandpa, who said "we used to call them letter hotels because each letter got its own room." Also, what a staple game show Wheel of Fortune has become. Call out a correct letter and it gets its own lighted box. The idea is that in each of these instances, the letters precede the words they constitute. Even with crosswords, you can often figure out the answer without knowing the word.
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