I’ve always been fascinated by dictionaries. We create
dictionaries one word at a time, attempting to nail down within
a printable tome all of the words the form a language, and for
many people such dictionaries represent something immutable, a
stamp of authenticity that states that this is the proper way to
represent legitimate forms of spelling, legitimate statements of
meaning, and in many cases some form of an audit trail that
attempts to provide the history of the words.  For all that,
dictionaries are fundamentally arbitrary. Someone has to make an
editorial decision as to whether a given word is in fact a
legitimate word with the language. Is sombrero an English word,
or a Spanish one. Is degauss, to remove a magnetic field, a term
of technical jargon or a formal member of the language. Is it
theater or theatre? My teenage daughter talks about her and her
friends being “random”, by which she means that she’s not easily
categorizable to modern marketing efforts. Random, to me, is a
stochastic definition