Those of us in the word business think we know the power of words. But most of us don’t know how very costly words used to be and therefore how limited was the impact they could have.
Information, of course, is one of the fundamental economic inputs, along with labor, capital, energy, and materials. And no fewer than three times in human history has the cost of storing, transmitting, and retrieving information been radically reduced by new technology, with revolutionary consequences each time.
Human beings are a communicative species because we are, profoundly, a social one, and the individuals of all social species communicate with their fellows. Many species, for instance, have a danger call. But only a handful (so far as we know) have the ability to convey information regarding things not in view, in other words, abstractions. Ravens, a few species of ants, and honey bees can communicate the location and distance of newly discovered food sources. But not even animals as clever as ravens (and they are awesomely clever) have anything resembling speech with its infinite ability to precisely and concisely convey information.
We will almost certainly never know when and how language evolved—there are dozens of theories, which means none of them is very convincing—but most linguists think that it had evolved by at least fifty thousand years ago, possibly far earlier, deep in the Paleolithic era.
Language, however, was long limited in two respects. First, there was no way
