How Humans Compressed Meaning Across Time

How the Smallest Signals Carried the Heaviest Meanings

In the 1990s, I worked with a brilliant veteran engineer, Roy, who understood something many forget in the age of fiber optics and cloud sync: the value of a bit. He built systems where every switch, relay, and LED mattered, and his devices were so resource-conscious that they could be debugged through a single blinking light. With nothing but an LED and a button, he rigged a Morse code interface to interrogate a device’s state. It was beautiful. Minimal. And above all, intentional.

This isn’t a story about hardware. It’s about how people, across all time and culture, have compressed what they needed to say into whatever vessel they had available—a puff of smoke, a drumbeat, a glance from a parent, a colored handkerchief, or a blink of light.

Drums, Fires, and the Language Before Language

Before the written word, there were the talking drums of West Africa, which encoded pitch-tonal languages like Yoruba across villages and forests. There were smoke signals, used by many Indigenous peoples of North America and beyond—compact, location-sensitive messages carried on the wind. There were colorful flags—not just national symbols, but fabrics worn with purpose: in hair, around arms, over shoulders, tucked into pockets.

Some of these signals conveyed identity, others expressed longing. Some protected the speaker while silently telling listeners they weren't alone. In every case, the message rang clear—if you knew how to listen.

The Tyranny of Memory: Brevity in Oral Societies

Oral cultures weren't simple—they were efficient. Without written records, people relied on rhythm, repetition, and formulaic structure to preserve knowledge. Epic poems weren't lengthy for grandeur's sake—they were long to aid memory. (Though, that did not help me on any of literature exams. Beowulf? Great story, too many words.)

Consider the griots (storytellers) of West Africa, reciting genealogies spanning centuries, or the Polynesian navigators who preserved star maps through song. In oral societies, language evolved to be memorable. Short sentences. Minimal clauses. Rhythms that the tongue could summon under pressure.

Writing Breaks the Limits (And Our Word Counts)

When humans began writing, we broke free from memory's constraints. Scribes could now nest clauses within clauses, stack metaphors like matryoshka dolls, and take their time crafting thoughts.

Early Sumerian writing was direct and simple: "Grain delivered. Temple full." But within centuries, it evolved into complex, nested legalese. Sound familiar?

As writing became cheaper, sentences grew longer and more elaborate. Renaissance texts often contained 60–70 words per sentence. Only when printing—and later mass literacy—demanded clarity did our writing become more concise again.

The First Compression Wave: The Telegraph

The telegraph charged by the word, making conciseness a financial necessity. Writing styles transformed overnight: journalists embraced the inverted pyramid, while poets like Emily Dickinson turned dashes into their own language.

Once again, communication returned to its elemental forms—Morse code, LED blinks, meaning distilled into pulses. Compression became culture.

Colorful Flags and Encoded Selves

In societies where speaking plainly could get you arrested—or worse—people turned to code. This wasn’t always digital. Some used colors. Some used placement. A cloth worn on the left side might mean one thing. Worn on the right, another. It wasn’t just fashion—it was survival.

These signals carried entire conversations without words. They weren’t loud, but they were undeniable. They whispered through the crowd, "I see you. Do you see me?"

The Glance Across the Room

Ask any child of any culture: the parental look is universal. It's preverbal and lightning-fast. "Don't you dare." "You're forgiven." "We'll talk about this later."

These aren't paragraphs—they're packets. Entire emotional payloads compressed into a single glance, hitting harder than a thousand words ever could.

Gettysburg: 271 Words of Eternity

In an era when politicians gave hours-long speeches, Abraham Lincoln delivered his in just two minutes. 271 words. Of course, that was after listening to others who were a bit more long-winded. So, did he just get tired and stop? I do not think so. Instead, he said (and who knows, maybe believed):

"The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here…"

How wrong you were, Mr. President. We remembered. For that address wasn't a speech—it was the distilled essence of national grief, defiance, and hope. It proved that compression, when done by a master, doesn't diminish meaning—it intensifies it.

Digital: The Great Compression (and Expansion)

In the age of SMS, 160 characters forced us back into Morse-like brevity. Then came Twitter, emojis, memes, and TikToks—all ways of saying just enough. Anyone remember the T9 method of typing?

T9 (Text on 9 keys) was a predictive text technology for mobile phones with numeric keypads in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Rather than pressing a key multiple times to cycle through letters (like hitting "2" three times for "c"), T9 allowed users to press each key once. The system predicted the intended word from the number sequence—for example, pressing 4-6-6-3 would produce "home." This revolutionary system made text messaging possible on any phone.

Yet alongside these brief messages, we now have podcasts stretching for hours and Medium posts (like this one) spanning thousands of words. We inhabit a world of split communication—simultaneously compressed and expanded.

We move fluidly between six-second clips and two-hour interviews. We dash off tweet threads, then craft detailed blog posts to tell the full story. Our tools offer us a choice: Watch, Comment, Like, Hate, or Scroll.

The LED Still Blinks

I still think about that engineer - his one LED, his button, his engineering. I have recently been told that engineering is about problem-solving and design within constraints. Sometimes, those constraints provide us with better solutions.

Though we have more bandwidth now, we still carry that wisdom: sometimes the message is better when it's tight, when it's encoded, when it fits in a blink, a puff of smoke, or a glance across the room.

We've always spoken this way, and we always will. Because the weight of a word isn't measured in length—it's measured in timing, context, and the courage to send it.

What signals have you inherited? What compressed languages do you still speak?