Spoken Words are strange things

Spoken word is strange. Without a way to catch it, record it, what happens? It disappears. Forever. 

Airwaves and vibrations dissipating as quickly as they appear. 

For centuries, millennia we only had one way to record thoughts. Words. Language. We had to write it down. 

We say we can hear the voice of those long past. But we can't. As much as I love the written word it misses so much. Inflection and tone. Breath. Accent. Vowels and consonants. 

If only we could have a way to lift that from the written pages of yore. To hear their voice. 

The closest is probably music right. Staff paper, notes and lyrics. Maybe that's what's makes it so magical. 

I don't know. 

I just wonder. What the voices of the past really sounded like. And how we can be sure. 

To catch the fleeting thing. The thoughts, the feelings, the moments. 

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There's a reason Shakespeare has had more staying power in the public conscious than Thomas Wyatt or Edmund Spenser. Christopher Marlowe is not as well know as Shakespeare but I think more people would know his work. 

Why?

We hear the words spoken. They wrote plays. 

Shakespeare is self explanatory, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, Othello, Hamlet, Julius Caesar. Works with turns of phrase that still resonate in the current conscious. Provided characters that have become archetypes for our society. Everyone has seen an adaptation of one of his plays. Probably spoke the words aloud in school. 

That carried them through society. Christopher Marlowe wrote a play that had some staying power too. He wrote a variation of Faust. The demonic bargain. We've seen that same archetype in plays and works. 

Quotes from them made it into society. 

We can look through history and what is more currently aware in the current culture and the works with the most adaptations made it through the fogs of time are the ones with adaptations in the mainstream. 

We know more quotes and ideas from Mary Shelley because of the multiple adaptations and uses of Frankenstein and his monster. Many rom-coms follow the structure and share a lineage to Elizabeth Bennett due to Jane Austen's work being presented so often. 

I'd never realized that. But it gave me some hope.

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I wrote the intro a couple weeks ago and shared it. I lamented how hard it was to capture the fleeting spoken word. 

One good friend brought up how playwrights do that. 

Punctuation, structure, they play a role (pun intended) in how we can capture the spoken word. 

And I started thinking about that a lot. 

She was right.

I couldn't not see who's effected our speech. How speech is perpetuated by current adaptations. I've been seeing it everywhere. 

And it's making me want to write more and better. 

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The funny thing is. I feel my writing is only going to get better by writing more often. And by speaking to more people. 

I need my speech and my writing to be more direct reflections of each other. 

That may sound crazy but stick with me for one second. 

I can take a lot more time to write a piece than respond to a spoken question. And how I think about responding to each changes how I express myself. 

I want to eliminate that gap. I want my speech to be more measured. I want my writing to be more representative of my thoughts and moods. I want to be more responsive in both. 

I can only do that by doing more. Communicating with more people. 

I guess that just means I'll be writing more. 

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