medium, the overextended man or culture, and the peripety or 
reversal that inevitably follows:

     He who stands on tiptoe does not stand firm;
     He who takes the longest strides does not walk the fastest . . .
     He who boasts of what he will do succeeds in nothing;
     He who is proud of his work achieves nothing that endures.

     One of the most common causes of breaks in any system 
is the cross-fertilization with another system, such as 
happened to print with the steam press, or with radio and 
movies (that yielded the talkies). Today with microfilm and 
micro-cards, not to mention electric memories, the printed 
word assumes again much of the handicraft character of a 
manuscript. But printing from movable type was, itself, the 
major break boundary in the history of phonetic literacy, just