Essential McLuhan 274 —1966 Although we think of speech [in mother tongues] as near and private, there is nothing about us that is so corporate and public. Speech in its subliminal resonance unites us with the most distant ages as well as with the present multitudes.—1972 ALPHABET The phonetic alphabet is unique in being formed by phonemes, or meaningless bits. All other alphabets consist mainly of morphemes, or meaningful bits. The extreme abstraction of meaning from the formal sign…releases the visual faculty from its embodiment in the other senses. In separation from sound and touch and semantics, both Euclid and logic become simultaneously possible.—1973 The translating of auditory into visual terms set up an inner life in man which separated himself from the exterior world and, in part, from his own senses, as we know from the study of pre-literate societies.—1953 The unique power [of the alphabet] is its power to separate sound, sight and meaning. The letters of our alphabet are semantically neutral… This divorce…has permeated and shaped all the perceptions of Western literate man.—1964 The Japanese are about to launch a multi-billion dollar program to impose Western phonetic literacy on the whole of Japan. This program will scrub off the entire face of Japan, eroding its oral culture… The ripping-off of the entire Japanese iden-tity will release a fantastic flood of violence and a corporate quest for new identity on a competitive scale unimagined in human history.—1974 The phonetic alphabet is the only one in which the letters are semantically neutral, lacking verbal structure or force. Since the visual image presented in these letters is acoustically and semantically neutral, they have had the extraordinary effect…of supporting the visual faculty independently.—1973 The translation of auditory into visual terms set up an inner life in man which separated him from the external world and, in part, from his own senses, as we know from the study of pre-literate societies.—1953 Phonetically literate man, from the Greeks to the present, has been consistently aggressive with his environment. His need to translate his environment into phonetic, literate terms turns him into a conqueror and a cultural bulldozer, or leveller.—1974 WRITING AND THE WRITTEN WORD In large measure [writing] is the spatialization of thought.—1954 Writing gives control over space. Writing produces at once the city. The power to shape space in writing brings the power to organize space architecturally. And when messages can be transported, then come the