Wordle Is the Word: A Logophile's Paean

tech.hindustantimes.com:

“In the beginning was the Word.” John was exaggerating in his Gospel — there had been rather a lot going on even before words. But he was on to something. Whenever humanity took a leap, words weren’t far.  They first became the Next Big Thing during the Stone Age. Once we started enunciating and understanding words — rather than just grunting or howling at one another — we had a clear edge over the neighbors. 

In the Bronze Age, we took it up a notch, with written words. Admittedly, the user interface of the beta versions — from hieroglyphics to cuneiform — left much to be desired. But once the Phoenicians launched Alphabet 2.0, they set the rest of us on a trajectory that remains as impressive as the arc of Moore’s Law in another context. 

Notable innovators included the likes of Johannes Gutenberg. The Chinese had dabbled in movable type, but it was the German goldsmith who got us properly into printing words — and thus into mass-producing as well as mass-consuming them. 

Sometimes, innovation went retro, by giving us new ways of hearing words. Around the time we discovered distance writing (that is, the tele-graph), we also figured out how to hear distant voices (through tele-phones). In our own WhatsApp era, all these word forms — spoken, written, hieroglyphic in the form of emoticons — are in flux. Where that mash-up leads, FWIW, remains unclear.

Which brings us to the bigger point about words. They can be the most beautiful things in the world, but also the ugliest. For every beacon of logophilia (love of words), there have always been countless victims of logophobia (fear of words, although that’s not actually a word) or logorrhea (think of diarrhea). 

For the logophiles — from Shakespeare to Webster, Tolkien or Seuss