The American heritage school dictionary.

by Bruce Bohle

ALPHABETICAL ORDER Alphabetical order, like spelling and the decimal system, is one of the elementary coding systems of our culture. Learning to alphabetize is a basic requirement of our education. It is also quite hard work, since the arbitrary order of the letters cannot be explained or made rational; in itself the order is meaningless and uninteresting. Only long repetition and practice can condition the mind into knowing automatically that Q follows P and that stationery follows stationary. But once the alphabet has been internalized, programmed into the brain, access to vast...

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