Thousands of years later, in an essay published in 1942, the writer Jorge Luis Borges captured the absurdity and scope of list-making with his own fictional taxonomy, supposedly found in an ancient Chinese encyclopedia titled Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge. In it, an unknown scribe orders all the animals of the world into fourteen categories. These include ‘those that belong to the emperor’; ‘trained ones’; ‘suckling pigs’; ‘mermaids’; ‘those included in this classification’; and, my personal favourite, ‘those that tremble as if they were mad’.
Tag yourself I'm those included in this classification
