Words are occurences, events

Fully literate persons can only with great difficulty imagine what a primary oral culture is like, that is a culture with no knowledge whatsoever of writing or even the possibility of writing. Try to imagine a culture where no one has ever 'looked up something'. In a primary oral culture, the expression 'to look up something' is an empty phrase: it would have no conceivable meaning. Without writing, words as such have no visual presence, even when the objects the represent are visual. They are sounds. You might 'call' then back — 'recall' them. But there is  nowhere to 'look' for them. They have no focus and no trace [a visual metaphor, showing our dependency on writing], not even a trajectory. They are occurences, events.

Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, 31.