The Alphabet as Technology

Robin has an interesting post about the technology of words:

Thinking of a language as a technology or a product is strange at first but the more you look at them the more they resemble microwaves or dishwashers; incredibly complicated under the hood but also sort of boring on the surface.

This got me thinking about the alphabet. It seems so rudimentary: twenty-six characters.

abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz

What can you do with those twenty-six characters?

These famous quotes, and the grandiose ideas condensed into their structure, are all expressions of the same twenty-six letters re-arranged in different order.

If I was on the alphabet marketing team — and I’m not talking about Google’s parent company here — I’d plug some punchy tagline like, “Twenty-six boring letters, an infinite number of exciting possibilities.”