Words are infrastructure

On any platform bigger than one team, language drifts. One screen says Save, the next says Apply, a third says Done, and all three mean the same thing. Help text argues with the error message underneath it. Tone fragments by product, then by squad, then by whoever wrote the string at five on a Friday. Nobody decides any of this. It accumulates.

We solved the same problem for components a decade ago. Tokens, governance, contribution models, a single source of truth, all of it built and defended in public. Then we left the words scattered across codebases as string literals, and the words are the part of the interface people actually read.

Building Strunk taught me the fix is structural rather than editorial. You do not solve language drift by hiring a better writer. You solve it by giving language the same infrastructure as colour, so it is managed, governed, versioned and owned by somebody whose name you can find. A style guide sits in a folder. A copy system sits in the build.

So here is the test. If changing your primary button colour takes one pull request and changing the word on it takes twenty, your words are not infrastructure yet. They are decoration that happens to be load-bearing.