Surgeons and lexicographers exist within a strange lived duality: your patient—human or verbal—is at once an anonymous sum of parts that you can label, work on, know. Yet at the same time, those parts work in concert with other parts to form a person with a name, a family, a community, a dog, bills, a history, a mystery scar on the chin that you, in your expertise, cannot account for. You are an expert of the part and cannot hope to describe the whole.
