Dewey Decimal Classification
The Dewey Decimal Classification (or Dewey Decimal system) is a beloved system that classifies books, and is in use throughout the civilized world, and is especially popular in the aging middle class. It is based on the division of all literature into the ten distinct categories (talk about segregation!) reference, philosophy, religion, society, language, science, technology, art, actual books, and history. It was introduced after the industrial revolution by Dewey Decimal, who introduced the ten major categories of writing, each aimed at geeks, pagans, fanatics, gossip girls, geeks, nerds, billionaires, snobs, normal people, and geeks, respectively.
History[edit]
Invention[edit]
The Dewey Decimal System was invented by a man who went by the name of Dewey P. Decimal. Nobody knows why he called himself that, because who would ever want people to refer to them like that, but he did. Dewey was born in the middle of nowhere, somewhere you haven't heard of, and if you had, you wouldn't remember. Dewey was a young lad who was woefully, hopelessly, and completely unorganized. His parents always complained about the state of his room, and he failed ninth grade twice because he forgot to attend too many classes.
Despite this complete failure on his part, he managed to make it to Amherst College, where he finally met a foe less prepared than he. Library, a longtime member of the tenured faculty at the university, was perhaps the only man less organized than Dewey. Up until Dewey's arrival, Library had simply left each book where it was, and put any new books on the nearest empty shelf. This was a mess. The astrologers were constantly digging through bogus astronomy works to find their tables, and the entomologists were faced with useless etymologies when they tried to find information on insects. Despite this, Dewey, an aspiring librarian, managed to work his way into the college's faculty under Library (although it took a few tries for him to remember where his office was, even after his first few years).
As Dewey had grown older, he had lost some of that disorganizedness. In fact, by the time that he had been at the library a few months, he had come to despise that trait of his, and he looked for a way to at least pretend that he could be organized, even if he would always be a mess inside. He decided, like many before him, that the only way to tame the wild chaos was to put everything in boxes as small as possible. Inspired by his "name", he created the ten categories listed above.
Setbacks[edit]
Although Dewey later came to be seen as a genius in his field, his system was met with severe pushback at first. To begin with, his boss, Library, was not impressed with Dewey's undermining of Library's system, which had worked for thousands of years (library himself had first worked at Alexandria before coming to Amherst). Dewey, angered at the poor outlook on likely his only real contribution to anything, tried to put pamphlets into circulation around the college and attempted to patent his system. However, the rest of the world was perfectly happy doing things the right way, and ignored him. Unfortunately, this peaceful period with our beloved confusing systems came crashing down after Library left Amherst because of bookworm infestation. As the new head of the library, Dewey was able to implement his system undeterred, and the unfortunate resounding success of it forced us all to use it.
Introduction[edit]
Dewey campaigned, and was able to worm into libraries around the country, and soon children's brains were being corrupted with silly distinctions between what was "science" and what was "technology". Faced with this unfortunate reality, and a new generation growing up expecting Dewey to be around every corner lead to the adoption of Dewey's system in most libraries here in the states.
The system[edit]
Again, the Dewey system splits things into ten main categories, each of which are then split into ten more categories, and each of those are split into ten more categories, and then came the decimals. While not all decimal values mean something, Dewey wanted to make sure that he was remembered even if libraries changed the name of the system because of some bogus liberal concern, and so he made his name an integral part of the system. The ten letters of his name, in order, d, e, w, y, p, c, i, m, a, and l, are all used to refer to the categories and sub categories (A is for Actual books, AA is for Greeks Books, etc.) extending to five digits, it the form of AWW.YY as an example, which refers to Shakespeare. As such, EEE represents the historical books of the old testament, and MAD is the code that will refer you to Celtic literature. He wasn't very forward thinking, however, because his own name, DEW.EY, leads one to random bibliographies, a subject so completely boring that no one would truly look for it.
Use today[edit]
Unfortunately for us, the Dewey Decimal system is still segregating people based on their interests around the country and the world. Fortunately for the future of society, however, alternate systems such as the library of congress are gaining popularity, making Dewey’s mid-life self obsession a less key element of children's childhoods. Unfortunately, these systems are much more difficult to use because some people in congress still feel that the more complex something is, the smarter the person that made it. Under that definition, Galileo would have been a dunce, Dewey, average, and some self-supposing prick the smartest man in history.