The problem with this interpretation is that words aren't simply tools. The word-as-a-tool may indeed yield useful things such as computer languages, but that's just about their whole utility, or toolness, if you will.

Words form the basis of a medium for conveying signals. Generally they are indeed used in a certain sense, but certainly not in the same sense tools are used. In what sense -- well, that's an interesting question, the essence of this matter lying in the fact that language, while certainly representable in geometric terms, is quite definitely not simple geometry, regardless of what the naïve may believe. You don't "learn" language through representation, you learn it through association, which is what all learning is at its core. And why, say, even domestic animals can learn to react a certain way to certain words.

As for the subject matter of this article: it's been quite a long while since the greater ones in the hierarchy observed that, quite perversely indeed, they can influence the actions of lesser individuals by uttering certain words in a certain way. This technique has been perfected to the level of science in the twentieth century, which indeed turns language into a certain sort of tool -- not in any way by "lowering language" itself, as language is what always has been; but by lowering said individuals to the level of tools (see Heidegger for details).