Humans invented words to help
remember and communicate.
Socrates was a curmudgeon
about it all and thought transforming words into writing would make our
memories lazy. More words got invented
expanding our vocabularies. Great ideas
were turned into words that stood the test of time– The Ten Commandments, War and Peace, grandmother’s recipe for
fudge. Along the way, we fell in love
with words and wrote poems. We selected
words for sound and meaning. In modern
times, daily newspapers shorted the lifespan of the written word to 24 hours. More recently, social media shortened a
word’s duration to only a few minutes.
Words buried other words under a nonstop and accelerating stream of updates
that are themselves quickly forgotten.
What’s next for words? Will they move fast enough for us? Carry enough meaning? Will the written word die off and we go back
to using pictures like our ancient ancestors drawing on cave walls?
