Andres Torres : Decisive Battle

Those two data can correlate, but that doesn’t mean they DO, and it doesn’t mean there is a consistent relationship that ought to make one think they do. To be quite honest, even if Torres has a high TB/H for ‘09, I wouldn’t assume, or even think, that he hit a lot of long home runs because I knew that statistic was elevated. All that stat tells me is all that stat tells me, that Torres had a relatively high number of bases per hit. I don’t know anything beyond that, and I shouldn’t assume it; if his TB/H is 2.0, I don’t know if that’s because he’s only hit doubles or half his hits are singles and half are triples or he’s getting some proportion of singles and homers or whatever. TB/H doesn’t even indicate that he’s hit ANY home runs (unless it’s above 3.0), so why would I think high TB/H = long home runs? For that matter, why SHOULD I think that high TB/H = long home runs, when there are quite a few scenarios in which it wouldn’t? The two are separable, independent statistics, which can tell us very different things. This is why I brought up ‘09 Damon: he would have a high TB/H, but a low average distance on his home runs, and unless Torres hits 24 or more bombs this year (unlikely, considering he’s at 10 but possible), then last year’s Damon and this year’s Torres will have similar TB/H despite very different average distance on their homers. And in fact you’ve validated my argument already: if PF did tell you whether a guy was hitting bombs, your memory wouldn’t have to be the best, because the stat would let you know. It doesn’t, so you had to go to memory.

As far as PF and SLG, I know they’re different, I said that. But if PF=TB/H, then PF doesn’t measure the fraction of all hits that are HRs, HR/H would measure that. A doubles hitter may very well have the same TB/H (and consequently the same PF) as a home run hitter as long as the doubles hitter has twice as many doubles as the HR hitter has home runs.

But my point had nothing to do with what the authorities on the English language accept, because those authorities aren’t the true authority, the people are. That’s why we see new definitions and new words added to the dictionary, because those words come into parlance for whatever reason, and they are acknowledged by the “authorities” as being words. They don’t invent new words, they merely recognize what everyone else has already decided. What’s right is pretty much all about what people accept, and they’re really no more of a decisive voice on what is and is not a word than you or me, they just have longer and more detailed lists of words.

The latin word data (pronounced `dah-tah’) is the neuter plural past participle of the first conjugation verb dare, `to give’ (it’s actually also the feminine singular past participle, but that really, really, doesn’t matter). The english word `data’ (pronounced `dah-tah’ or `day-tah’) is a noun referring variously to measurements, observations, images, and the other raw materials of scientific enquiry. In this sense it originated in the physical sciences and computing in the mid twentieth century, and is busily and cheerfully spreading into other areas. The two words are, not surprisingly, etymologically related.

As a past participle, latin data is precisely analogous to the english word `given’, as in `I have given’. In latin as in english, past participles can be used as adjectives — `…accomplishing a given end’ — and even as nouns — ` ``The English language’’…from the point of view of any individual speaker…is a ``given’’, it is not something he creates for himself’; using adjectives as nouns is more common in latin than in english (these examples, like most of the others in this note, along with essentially all of the history, comes from the OED).

As a noun, latin datum is in the second declension, and neuter.

Latin data appears to have made its way into english in the mid 17th century (according to the OED, again), with english `data’ making an appearance in the 1646 sentence `From all this heap of data it would not follow that it was necessary’, illustrating the OED’s sense 1a: `A thing given or granted; something known or assumed as fact, and made the basis of reasoning or calculation; an assumption or premiss from which inferences are drawn.’ (note that this very first appearance of the word in english refers to a quantity of data, a `heap’, rather than a number). Datum — the neuter singular past participle — makes its first appearance almost a hundred years later, in the same sense. Sense 2, for the OED, is `Facts, esp. numerical facts, collected together for reference or information’, first sighted in 1899. `Data’ as a computing term is first spotted in 1946, in the Annals of the Computation Laboratory, Harvard University: `Two card feeds for supplying the machine with empirical or other data’. Interestingly, this is listed as sense 1d, meaning that the OED editors think this usage is closer in meaning to the `thing given or granted’ of sense 1a, than to the more scientific sense of sense 2: I’m not sure I would agree.

That 1646 quotation doesn’t suggest that the word was a particularly novel one, so that it will likely have had some prehistory amongst english-speakers. But that prehistory was as likely in latin as in english: it was in the seventeenth century that intellectuals across Europe were remaking science, and doing it, radically, in english, french and other vernaculars, rather than latin. As they remade science, they remade, reworked, and simply invented their technical vocabularies, against the background of the substantial technical vocabularies of the late latin in which they had been educated, and this is when words like english `data’ appear.

What that means is that there was almost certainly no latin word for the concept that we now identify by the english word `data’, and that to the extent that data was a technical term in late latin, and hence in early modern english, it surely meant nothing, or nothing much, beyond the slightly specialised mathematical meaning of the english word `given’ (as in `Given ten goats…’ as the preamble to a rather tedious algebra problem). If you know otherwise, I’d be delighted to hear.

Put another way, that means that the word `data’, as a technical term referring to the ore of observations, which can be painstakingly reduced to extract knowledge, is not a latin word at all. It’s a native english word with a latin past, which means, bluntly, that we get to choose how to use it, and if its meaning changes over time — as it has — then its grammatical analysis can reasonably and properly migrate also.

Put yet another way, Etymology can satisfy our curiousity about our language, or give colour, texture and ripeness to the words we use, but it can do no more than suggest how we actually use the words, when we do use them, ourselves, now.

owl, this isn’t a formal context and you’re kind of being a dicks.