the.com/letter
a thought stripped naked, folded twice, and mailed into someone else's future
means A letter is either a written message sent from one person to another, or one of the symbols that make up an alphabet.
from From Latin 'littera,' meaning a single character of the alphabet — and in the plural, 'litterae,' a written document or epistle. It traveled through Old French 'lettre' into English. The same root gives us 'literature,' 'literal,' and 'literacy,' all clustering around the act of marking meaning into symbols. Fittingly, one word came to hold both the smallest unit of writing and the whole folded message built from them.
- oldest example
- Sumerian clay tablets carried letters 4,000 years ago
- longest delivery
- a postcard once arrived 100 years late
- hidden weapon
- sealed letters once smuggled poison, codes, and prison escapes
- dead practice
- unstamped love letters were sealed with actual blood
the magna carta — signed june 15, 1215 in england, limited royal power and established rule of law
einstein's letter to roosevelt — august 2, 1939, warned of nazi atomic bomb development, influenced manhattan project