So that government can function. Sir Humphrey Appleby, Cabinet Secretary to Prime Minister the right honourable James Hacker, stated that if no records were available it would be "the thin end of the wedge; the end of civilisation as we know it."
Of course, Sir Humphrey was awfully fond of hyperbole.
In my callow youth, when I was learning to be a computer programmer (as software engineers were called in those ancient days) I wrote text processing software for a number of publications, one of which was the UK Government's "Guide to Statistics".
There are a LOT of statistical publications in the UK.
The point of this story concerns my software making decisions about when (and where) words could be hyphenated at the ends of lines.
For around 6 months everyone was pleased to see no hyphenations at all.
After 10 months, it looked really odd, so I revisited my software, and realized that I had hyphenation switched off.
I switched it back on.
It worked well, but you'd be surprised the number of times the words "analysis", "analyse" and "analysed" are used in a book that is a guide to statistics.
Guess where my text processing routines decided to hyphenate those words?
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