Volatilization
1. Rebus
Writing systems that arise de novo, such as Egyptian hieroglyphs, Sumerian cuneiform, and ancient Chinese script, tend to use complex logograms. These symbols represent words through a combination of semantic and phonetic content.
These scripts are cumbersome. They are difficult to learn because you have to separately learn the symbol for each individual word; although there are elements that are shared between logograms and that indicate roughly the same thing, many logograms are partially or completely opaque: just by knowing about the shared elements, you can't necessarily predict what the full logogram will be for a word, and you can't necessarily understand what word a novel logogram is representing.
On Chinese logograms:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_character_radicals
On Egyptian logograms:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_hieroglyphs#Writing_system
These scripts also don't have a natural or standard way to expand the set of words they can express. Each new word has multiple plausible ways to represent it, often ambiguously with other words.
One speculates that these constraints were ok for the purposes of the priests or administrators who employed these originary scripts. They were well-resourced elites with the education needed to use their script. They would tend to be in close contact with each other, so they could learn new standard symbols. Also, they might tend to work in a set of fairly specific contexts—maybe spirituality, administration, accounts, supplies, historical records, treaties, diplomacy—so they could get along with a written vocabulary that doesn't necessarily extend to the whole variety of specialized activities (technologies, social practices, etc.). But the scripts were somewhat limited in how they could be applied.
Then some workers made a radical invention (wiki). These workers presumably weren't native Egyptian speakers, but they labored in regions that used Egyptian hieroglyphs and they had some functional knowledge of that writing system. These workers wanted to use writing to represent their own language. But they did not simply use Egyptian hieroglyphs for words with corresponding meanings, perhaps because they weren't proficient with hieroglyphs or because the sound-meaning correspondence would be even more obscured.
So, instead of using symbols to represent words, these workers used just a few symbols for just a few words in a bastardized way: They used a symbol to stand for just the initial sound of the word. This principle—the rebus principle—is used in hieroglyphics and other logographic systems. But they took the rebus principle further, using a small set of symbols only for their sounds, and representing words just as a sequence of sounds (rather than mixing partial semantic and phonetic indicators).
They ripped the complex symbol out of its rich, full context, and instead used it for a stripped-down function. Thus they invented the alphabet. This new way of using symbols eventually allowed symbols to be simplified (you only need a couple dozen to be distinguishable) and made the system much easier to learn (a small set of simpler symbols). The system is also more powerful: It can express any word that's composed of sounds that are approximated by the available letters.
This volatilization of the written word into written speech-sounds produced a system that's much easier to learn and extend. Symbolic representation of spoken language was ripped out of its original context, boiled down, made more volatile (combinable), and then applied in a much more generative way.
2. Rock
The same thing kinda happened with bouldering. At first, you have natural bouldering. That's where you wander around outside looking for big rocks, and then you try to climb them. The rocks might be slippery or sharp or overgrown or crumbly. The rock might be too tall or too short. It might be a boring route, or it might be impossible. It won't change over time (except for wear and tear). You can't control the weather. And, you get what you get—if there's one rock, there's one rock. (You could also do buildering, i.e. bouldering on buildings. E.g. the Doe Traverse on UCBerkeley campus.)
That has an undeniable aesthetic to it. And discovering and developing natural boulder problems has its own whole art. But, these are the hieroglyphics of climbing. They are difficult (impossible) to modify, and they don't have recombinable parts; they come as a whole, and don't provide fuel for tinkering.
Gym bouldering pulverizes this concept into atomic elements. Now climbing holds are not natural ripples or cracks or corners in natural rock, but rather lumps of plastic with holes for screwing them in, detachable / rotatable / movable / interchangeable:
The wall is made of sections of plywood with bolt holes. Sets of matching-colored holds are screwed into the wall, forming a route to climb. The routes are periodically taken down, and new routes are put up.
This atomization volatilizes the elements of bouldering. Strange, rare, unnatural hold shapes can be easily produced. Holds can be made less sharp, and texture or lack of texture can be controlled and deployed. The holds can be combined into routes, and the routes can then be disassembled and the holds cleaned and reused in different combinations and orders. The positions of holds can be tweaked by the routesetters—rotating or sliding the holds along the wall or swapping them for other similar holds, to tune the difficulty and style of movement needed to climb that section.
Volumes (large plywood polyhedra) can be screwed into the wall to shape the larger-scale 3D form of the wall.
Arrangements of rock that induce advanced technical moves can be isolated, simplified, and exaggerated so that they are achievable by beginners. They can be repeated in single routes. Rare but {interesting, fun, instructive} moves can be provided plentifully. Routes can be designed to be evenly difficult (rather than having one very hard move in an otherwise easy climb). Generally, the concentration of valuable novelty is greatly increased.
3. Talk
Words give handles to hubs of desire paths in thought. By making words, we can volatilize the thoughts they capture.
4. Phemus
To become better at making words, we can expressivize the morphemicon. We carry around with us (in each individual, and in our literature) our library of words, which come from etymons. The etymons have been sclerotized together into opaque, context-specific words—semantic hieroglyphs, functional enough but bespoke and clumsy compared to a language of modular, volatilized elements.
Well, it's not that our words should themselves be less opaque. To try to universally push against opaqueness would be to swim against the current of meaning—to mutilate and disfigure the natural old-growth forests that grow up around a word, drawn from the many contexts where it is deployed and has historically been deployed. Rather, we want controlled burns, fertilizer, and new frontiers. Morphemes liberated from their words, drawn from other languages, and backformed from specialized frontier jargon; phonologically beveled to intermesh with other morphemes, practiced-with; and then distilled and regularized by the next generation of speakers.