Getting Back Home Safely

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If you want to write about something, it pays to organise your writing somehow. People like things that are in some order or another. It gives them a sense of familiarity. It makes them feel safe. It gives them a path to guide them there and back again.

A dictionary is only useful because it is organised. Imagine getting, for Christmas, the 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary containing entries for 171,476 words in current use, and 47,156 obsolete words. Imagine further that these words were...