Thinking about documenting language brings on a gurgle of dread deep in the editorial gut. The philosophy of citation gathering actually runs counter to how language forms. Because we live in a literate society with comparatively easy access to books and education, we tend to believe that the written word is more important and has more weight than the spoken word. It makes some sort of sense: speech is ephemeral, captured only once by the listener and sorted like mental junk mail, a little slip of information that may or may not be useful and that either gets tossed or ends up moldering
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