I pen hundreds of thousands of words each year, and sometimes feel I’m contributing to an ongoing problem. There are too many words in the world. We are bombarded by them. We pass by street-signs as we read our latest phone-texts, on our way to the shops with their proliferation of labels and adverts. Words scroll across our TV screens. They fill our style mags and free newspapers. They are plastered across our buses and phone-boxes. But words can lie and, hell, even at their best they lack precision.
— Ian Rankin
Wednesday March 11, 2009