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?

• “Energy equals mass times the speed of light squared.”
• “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”
• “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

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.”