The fetishization of writing

In his recent What Language Is linguist John McWhorter mentions English speakers' fetishization of written English over spoken English.

But of course, reviewing both the present living languages as well as linguistic history tells us that writing is not language; rather its a notational device originally used to allow speech to reproduce itself at a distance ( of space or time. )

To emphasize his point, he discusses a couple of languages ( Sinhalese and colloquial Indonesian, ) which take this strange preference for the written form to even greater extremes.

So, yes, its no surprise that a culture which equates the symbolic form with the thing itself, should produce people who claim to be "speaking backwards" when they're vocalizing backwards writing.

Dante