the sound of the name, so that in self-defense we add: “How do 
you spell your name?” Whereas, in an ear culture, the sound  of 
a man’s name is the overwhelming fact, as Joyce knew when he 
said in Finnegans Wake , “Who gave you that numb?” For the 
name of a man is a numbing blow from which he never 
recovers.

     Another vantage point from which to test the difference 
between hot and cold media is the practical joke. The hot 
literary medium excludes the practical and participant aspect 
of the joke so completely that Constance Rourke, in her 
American Humor , considers it as no joke at all. To literary 
people, the practical joke with its total physical involvement is 
as distasteful as the pun that derails us from the smooth and 
uniform progress that is typographic order. Indeed, to the 
literary person who is quite unaware of the intensely abstract