Explorations 191 The staccato stutter of the typewriter on the other hand is really close to the stutter that is oral speech. The typewriter is part of our oral revolution today. “Bygmeister Finnegan of the stuttering hand” is Joyce’s figure of the inventor of spoken words and of architecture. The typist yatters to the script. Today children have to have radio or gramophone playing in order to attend to visual tasks of reeling and writhing, rocking and rolling, reading and writing. The silent class-room favors only those who have been rigidly swaddled in habits of silent solitary reading. Is class-room swaddling a principal factor in juvenile delinquency? The normal environment with auditory messages carried simultaneously by different media on several levels creates new habits of attention in which the adult world is little-skilled. The fall in the level of literacy goes hand in hand with a great increase in range of oral verbalization. Literacy is the social acceptance of the monopoly of one mode of perception. It would be well to diagnose the total situation before pronouncing a general moral doom. Naturally the professional scribes make it their business to issue moral judgements on this technological change. legal contracts in today’s business are just the minutes of the last meeting. Oil Executive 12 In English libel law, “the greater the truth the greater the libel.” The English conception of libel is aristocratic and oral, the American is written. Oral codes have no loop-holes for legal eagles. In oral codes the sanctions are total: ostracism-the duel. In written, sanctions are lineal and metrical—the fine, the damages. The Merchant of Venice is the dramatization of a clash between oral and written codes.