By now we might hope for some kind of consensus on the genesis of the Homeric poems, but the plot seems as muddled as ever. In the history of Homeric studies we find our truest exemplum of cultural myopia. We don't know what to do with Homer because we think he is just like us. As we change, he changes too. Our present myopia is, in my experience, bound up with a set of terms that mean too many things, or contradictory things, to too many people, creating the illusion that we have grasped something when we haven't. From a longer list of similar terms, I have selected six to discuss in this article: text, orality, literacy, tradition, dictation, and education. I do not hope to present a universal or historical description of how such terms have been used, but to show how they have come to be mixed up with each other in a perplexing chaos, presenting a distorted description of the nature and origin of early Greek literature.