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Taxonomy: Theory and practice of classification.

Classification: Any method of organizing and systematizing the diversity of organisms, living and extinct, according to a set of rules (Penguin Dictionary of Biology, 9th ed., 1994).

Taxonomy is no longer typological. It’s now systematics, consciously based in the axiom “The observer is part of the system.” —Richard Erlich, e-mail, 2003

Formal critics all begin with a truth that ideological critics too often neglect; form is in itself interesting, even in the most abstract extreme. Shape, pattern, design carry their own interest—and hence meaning—for all human beings. What some critics have called “human meanings” are not required; nothing is more human than the love of abstract forms. —Wayne C. Booth, introduction to M. M. Bakhtin’s Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics