I am only an eighth (the spelling of that always looks wrong) of the way through this article and cannot wait any longer to pass it on. Maybe prompted by the title...

interdisciplines : The Future of Web Publishing : Back to the Oral Tradition Through Skywriting at the Speed of Thought

Some quotes that have already jumped out at me :)

'In an evolutionary competition, the symbolic "thieves" quickly out-survive and out-reproduce the honest sensorimotor "toilers," who must learn everything the hard way, from experience.'

'The child grounds his first word meanings through direct sensorimotor toil, the old way, and can then (in principle) acquire all the rest through symbolic theft, consisting of recombinations of his already-grounded symbols, rather as in the case of dictionary definitions.'

'So " cognitive barter " may be a better descriptor than " theft " for the adaptive advantage conferred by language.'