Let's Play Internet!
I won't claim this observation is at all profound, but it is curious, I thought.* Is this an example of a new game, named something like "Internet Quoting", akin to the well-known game known variously as "Telephone" or "Rumors" or "Whispers"? In the older game of telephone, one person in a line of, say, 20 people, whispers to her or his neighbor a sentence, phrase, or some other suitably short verbal expression. The person receiving the information, the "whisperee", then turns to the next person in line and whispers in that person's ear. This continues until the end when the last whisperee reveals the stream of words that s/he received. This end product is then compared with the way the information started out, and much hilarity ensues from observing the unintended corruption suffered by the original stream of words.
The similar network game, let's call it "Internet", involves quoting excerpts from someone else's blogs in one's own blog, and then having that quotation quoted by others, etc. The fun comes from watching the phrase or the attributions change as the quotation moves around. I'm thinking of becoming an Internet anthropologist, if only someone would pay me to track down these mutating phrases as they move around the Internet.
I was reading an interesting posting by driftglass, ' “Last throes”? ', in which he makes the striking assertion that President Reagan was responsible for elevating the anecdote to the position of national policy determiner, an idea I thought was fascinating.
Along the verbally stimulating and colorful way to his main point (as is his wont, and a good reason for reading his writing), he quotes James Walcott as saying in his blog when a similar verbal necessity arose:
The quote reads thus: “You rationalize it however you want, but that doesn't make it true. Or, as my friend Orac says 'The plural of anecdote is not data.'”
What a clever thing to say, thought I: "The plural of anecdote is not data." Surely I would have remembered reading Orac type that, wouldn't I? I do, after all, read Orac's blog.#
Well, Mr. driftglass does point out that Mr. Wolcott does himself point out that he was referred to Orac's saying by Kung Fu Monkey, and indeed that's correct. Here's what Mr. Wolcott wrote when he quoted Mr. Monkey:
"I'm not surprised your conservative-toned movie/script/project went nowhere. The vast majority of projects disappear. You rationalize it however you want, but that doesn't make it true. Or, as my friend Orac says 'The plural of anecdote is not data.'
In fact, the topic of Mr. Wolcott's article is the lack of a liberal conspiracy to control the film message in Hollywood products, a theme much adored by reactionary conspiracy theorists, and for this he points to Mr. Monkey (aka John Rogers), who is a professional screenwriter. In Mr. Wolcott's words:
A tip of the beret to Roger Ailes, who guides seekers of wisdom to a long and authoritative post by John Rogers at Kung Fu Monkey on the subject of Hollywood and its corrosive influence on everything heartland Americans cherish and value (when they're not doing crystal meth).
Sure enough, in the referenced article, "I WISH Hollywood Was That Organized …", John Rogers (who has a degree in physics, I was happy to discover, so I felt an immediate kinship, particularly since I'm an aspiring writer) sets out, with humor, to dispel the notion that Hollywood has the time or money or energy to work up a liberal conspiracy:
Oh — "Hollywood" is out of touch. "Hollywood" is liberal. The idea that "Hollywood" is some monolithic, organized … well, ANYTHING with a unified creative vision is patently ridiculous.
Sure enough, deep in the text, as he responds to the notion that someone once had a script turned down = evidence of liberal conspiracy, he talks about his own 25% hit rate with his liberal scripts and says
I'm not surprised your conservative-toned movie/script/project went nowhere. The vast majority of projects disappear. You rationalize it however you want, but that doesn't make it true. Or, as my friend Orac says "The plural of anecdote is not data."
Ta da! Now we'e getting close. So off I went to ask the all-knowing Google about "Orac anecdote data", and it gave me two relevant hits, entries in Orac's blog. The first is from 25 April 2005, "How not to win friends and influence people", in which Orac writes, in a discussion about Attorney General Gonzales and alternative medicines:
So I did the only thing that was left to me. I explained that a single anecdote does not constitute evidence for general efficacy, using one of my favorite sayings, "The plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data.'"
So there we see that Orac himself says that this is one of his favorite sayings, and who could disagree? It's a very useful retort.
But wait! There's one more entry in Orac's blog mentioned by Google, in which this phrase appears, and it's date is earlier than the one above: 25 March 2005, "A Response to "Herbinator"". This, I thought, would be the terminus, and I would see laid bare the original uttering of the phrase.
Alas, although it's one of his favorite phrases and, indeed, "as Orac says", it seems that the phrase was brought to his blog by someone named "Joan" who write this in the comments:
Joan said…
I'm sure you've heard this before, and not that I didn't enjoy your very well-put dressing down of the Herbinator, but sometimes it's nice to have that concise bon mot ready at the finger tips: The plural of "anecdote" is not "data."
"Joan" turns out to be "Joan O'Connell Hedman, freelance content provider", according to her website, which is cool since I myself am an occasional freelance content provider (i.e., "writer"). She also keeps a blog called "Oasis of Sanity". Back to the all-knowing Google with a request for information about "oasis sanity anecdote data".
Yes, two relevant entries again from Joan's blog.
The latest is dated 27 April 2005, a story called "ambushed". Joan tells about being in line to buy Splenda when one of those irritating do-gooders starts in on her about how Splenda has "chlorine" in it and will surely do irreparable harm to her insides. Joan apparently tried her best to ease the woman into the twenty-first century and a modicum of understanding of basic chemistry, but with no success. To herself she comments:
I've read all the "Oh my God!" emails over on Mercola's site, but I also know that the plural of "anecdote" is not "data". Splenda has been in use for decades now, and it has garnered only a tiny fraction of the horror stories that aspartame has racked up.
The earlier entry, "the Gawande kerfuffle: towards better medical outcomes", is dated 6 January 2005. In this one she writes (in the context of criticizing author Gawande for his slipshod handling of data, but the context doesn't interest me that much) — bold and italics are original:
I'd like to remind both the Postrels and Hu that the plural of anecdote is not data.(2)
Could it be? Is that a reference to a note that I see at the end of that sentence? It is indeed, and here is what she says:
(2) I have no idea who said this first, either. It wasn't me.
Alas, the trail grows cold right there for this particular chain of references. I could return to the all-knowing, but asking about " 'plural of anecdote' " gives 8,000 hits that would take awhile to sort out. "Plural of anecdote is data" is only an order of magnitude better.
But that's okay, this was still a fun round of the game "Internet".
[31 July 2005 update:]
I am delighted to see that I am now a dailyKos-designated expert on "the plural of anecdote is not data", thanks to "paradocs" and hisher amusing post in experimental anthropology called "Road Trip: playing 'Liberal Survivor' in Texas", where we find
And, in my observation – comparing road trips to Wisconsin last December and earlier this month, the frequency of of "W '04" bumper stickers on cars seems to be diminishing. I do realize that the plural of anecdote is not data.
and a link to yours truly.
Without meaning any disrespect, but in a spirit of celebrating the work of grammar police around the world, this is a good time to emphasize one of the many useful ways that one should use quotation marks. In this case, quotation marks around a word indicate to the reader that the author is referring to the word itself rather than the word's referent. For example
An apple might be red or yellow or green, but "apple" has five letters.
People tend to use this rule intuitively, although it is sometimes confused with thinking that the quotation marks are being used somehow to emphasize the word — a job for italics.
Therefore, I'd prefer to continue seeing this gramatically clearer usage of the cliché:
The plural of "anecdote" is not "data".
———-
*It also reminds me of my own personal issues with the widely spread notion that an academic named James Killaris is the coiner of the word "earworm". I discussed some of this in my own "Earworm Origins".
#I do remember seeing and probably skimming through both of the posts that I mention here, but obviously I didn't pay enough attention to the one to notice the phrase when he quoted it in the text. This just goes to show that it's next to impossible to overlook anything of importance on the internet!
In: All, Common-Place Book, Such Language!, The Art of Conversation
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on Monday, 8 August 2005 at 18.21
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The Matthew Effect
A little while back ("Let's Play Internet!") I wrote about trying to track down an authoritative attribution for this quotation:
The plural of "anecdote" is not "data".
It was fun but inconclusive, barely penetrating the surface of the mur…