Many years ago, I started reading a book in a bookstore that argued that a key step in our intellectual development was when we went from two-way conversation (grunting at each other) to three-way communication (communicating via some medium). When we figured out that we could represent our thoughts on a medium and that others could reliably make sense out of what we’d written, it was a very big deal. Sure, there’s about a million books that deal with this, but this book was a riot; it seemed like the product of a college sophomore doing acid for the first time. He or she coined a weird term for this three-way communication that was like “tertial smegma” or something.
I couldn’t afford it and didn’t have a credit card. I’ve been looking using Google and looking through Amazon, but I’m not finding it. Kind of a needle in a haystack.
Does anyone remember such a book? It was short, maybe 150 pages, if that’s any help, and it may have been first published in the 50’s or early 60’s.