Words are an amazing thing and the written word is this incredible, magical means to communicate what is in one person's mind to someone else's mind when they have never met and even potentially across time. You can read the written words of people who are no longer alive, sometimes in cases where they died centuries before you were ever born. But there are lots of ways this form of communication can go wrong. I generally think of this as the chair problem . Chair is a perfectly useful word but it it somewhat vague. There are many objects that can rightly be called a chair and they differ wildly. If you are trying to give someone instructions for how to accomplish a thing, telling them to put a chair in that spot is probably not sufficient information, especially if they have to purchase said chair. If they are grabbing one from the supply room or elsewhere in the same building, you may not need to give a lot of specifics because there may be a limited selection of chai...