At best, the picture-writing, while intelligible enough to its originators, was an incomplete and clumsy method of treasuring and transmitting knowledge. It was very liable to misinterpretation and misapplication. It was always exposed to the possibility of being misunderstood, inasmuch as every picture might have a variety of applications or significations, and thus might represent a number of different though kindred things or conceptions. "Thus in Egyptian we find two legs might represent simply the legs of a man, but they might denote 'walking,' 'going,' 'running,' 'standing,' 'support,' and even 'growth,' and their significance had to be divined without further explanation or assistance."[43] The exposure to error involved in the decipherment of the ancient picture-writing may be illustrated by what is said to have been an actual occurrence of modern times. It is related of an illiterate though not necessarily ignorant grocer who, being unable to write, kept his accounts by picturing the various articles bought and sold at his little store. Usually there was no occasion for any one to dispute the accuracy of his "charges" though they were recorded in a species of hieroglyphics--his own invention. On one occasion, however, the grocer was taken to task by a customer who "questioned" the "account" of a _cheese_ which had been "charged up" against him. The customer protested that he had never bought a whole cheese, but acknowledged that he had bought what resembled a whole cheese in shape--a _grindstone_. This admission supplied a clue to the error in the grocer's "charges," for, in his picture-record he had inadvertently omitted the square hole in the center of his picture which would have transformed the "charge" of a cheese into that of a grindstone. In like manner, there was always an imminent and special exposure to error in the "record" with the ideographic hieroglyphic writing. And in addition to the inherent disabilities of the picture-writing and its exposure to a mistaken decipherment, these hieroglyphics gradually lost somewhat of their purely representative and symbolical value and thus, by being conventionalized, came into a more universal and a permanent use. Out of this fact grew the larger significance of the _demotic_ writing as contrasted with the _hieratic_ or priestly writing.