"And when you think about it, language has always been about the cloud. When we humans comprehend a word or a sentence, a whole network of knowledge and memories is invoked. The pattern of activation is likely to follow the famous power law. In such a distributed environment, there is no strict central control. The scattered and haphazard nature of processing has always been the defining factor of the conversations that we carry every day. And the chain of causality does not end with an individual brain. Words have been passed on from people to people, over the years, mediated by spoken words, written records, on the air, and through accidental encounters."