The Appearance of Statistical Ideas in Prose, Poetry, and Drama

271 Pages·2017·1.93 MB·English

by  Robert Boruch

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Robert Boruch
University of Pennsylvania, [email protected]
Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/gse_pubs
Part of the Education Commons
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Boruch, R. (2018). The Appearance of Statistical Ideas in Prose, Poetry, and Drama: A Dictionary of
Quotations, Aphorisms, Apothegms, Excerpts and Epigrams. Retrieved from https://repository.upenn.edu/
gse_pubs/444
This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/gse_pubs/444
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It is not always easy to understand ideas that are statistical or probabilistic in character. It is even less
easy to explain those ideas well.
The quotations in this collection were assembled partly to understand how to understand, at least insofar
as words (rather than statistical models) permit, and how writers think and explain.
One of the motives here is also to assure that readers know from where the quotations come. Anybody
nowadays can do a Google search and get what is alleged to a quote by someone famous. But the
Googler might never know from where the thing came. Here, the intent is to assure that the right sources,
properly cited, and the page numbers etc. are identified.
The final motive is amusement. If these quotations amuse and entice others’ interest, that would be
lovely.
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Education
This working paper is available at ScholarlyCommons: https://repository.upenn.edu/gse_pubs/444
TITLE: The Appearance of Statistical Ideas in Prose, Poetry, and Drama:

A Dictionary of Quotations, Aphorisms, Apothegms, Excerpts and Epigrams

AUTHOR/EDITOR: Robert F. Boruch, University Trustee Chair Professor, University of
Pennsylvania, [email protected]

WITH ASSISTANCE FROM : Alex Fu Wang, MSEd Candidate, University of Pennsylvania,
[email protected]

DATE AND TIME: 2/1/2018

STATUS: Draft Manuscript pdf version

PREPARED FOR: Submission to publishers. Classes at University of Pennsylvania,
Northwestern University, Boston College, and others.

POTENTIAL AUDIENCES/READERS: Graduate level courses and Professors/Instructors at
Universities and Colleges in Departments and Schools of Statistics, Public Policy, Research
Methods in Social, Behavioral, and Education Sciences including Criminology and Biostatistics,
Schools of Communication, Nursing. Also, anybody with a taste for literature and statistical
evidence with a taste for amusement of sorts.

Graduate School of Education and Statistics Department Wharton School
3700 Walnut Street
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-6216
215 898 0409 (office)
215 898 0532 (fax)
[email protected]
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CONTENTS

Introduction

Motives

Production Rules

Pedigrees

Other Collections, Collectors, and Authors

References

Dictionary

Author Index

Subject Index
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A-185/ A-190/ A-239
Introduction

Statistical Ideas in Prose, Poetry, and Drama. A Dictionary of Quotations for Readers with an
Interest in Statistical Evidence: Aphorisms,
Apothegms, Excerpts and Epigrams

Robert Boruch

Motives

It is not always easy to understand ideas that are statistical or probabilistic in character. It
is even less easy to explain those ideas well.

The quotations in this collection were assembled partly to understand how to understand,
at least insofar as words (rather than statistical models) permit, and how writers think and
explain.

One of the motives here is also to assure that readers know from where the quotations
come. Anybody nowadays can do a Google search and get what is alleged to a quote by
someone famous. But the Googler might never know from where the thing came. Here, the
intent is to assure that the right sources, properly cited, and the page numbers etc. are identified.

The final motive is amusement. If these quotations amuse and entice others’ interest, that
would be lovely.

Production Rules

Since 1985, some simple and elastic rules were used to put this dictionary together.

The collection focuses on quotations from prose, poetry, and drama that illuminate the way
writers, some writers at least, think about quantitative information and evidence. Humor and
insight, when combined get more points.

The broad categories for classifying the quotations are “technical.” Subcategories are usually
non-technical. The literate peruser should not find them demanding.

Original sources are important. Consequently, the author’s name, the work and the year of
publication, and page numbers are included where possible.

Others’ books of quotations are important of course. A standard for recognition that is
employed here is that original sources are identified. Bergan Evans (1978) and H.L. Mencken
(1942) and Sills and Merton (1991) were especially conscientious in this respect.
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Pedigree

Collectors of quotations are in ample supply. But collectors of quotations about
evidence, especially statistical and probabilistic evidence, in scientific contexts are not. One of
the exceptions was George Udny Yule. The Pearson and Kendall (1970) volume of Yule’s edited
work tells us that (p. 422):

I began to keep a commonplace book many years ago, filled with quotations of
rude things people have said about statistics. I gave up as they became less and
less imaginative...

Dictionary definitions are included here because a dictionary can be pithy. Some are
short, following T. Weller’s (1982) definition of “minims”:

Minim, n: a statement expressed in proverbial or sentential form but having no
general or practical use whatsoever. Compare maxim.

Lest the reader take all this too seriously, listen to the advice of other collectors of these
things--what they have said about their own efforts.

Ambrose Bierce, who was no slouch on this account, gives the following:

Aphorism: Predigested wisdom
The flabby wine-skin of his brain
Yields to some pathologic strain
And voids from its unstored abysm
The driblet of an aphorism.
(Bierce, 1958, p. 12)

and

Epigram: A short, sharp saying in prose or verse, frequently characterized by acidity or
acerbity and sometimes by wisdom.

...In each human heart are a tiger, a pig, an ass,
and a nightingale. Diversity of character is due
to their unequal activity.
(Bierce, 1958, p. 37)

and

Adage: Boned wisdom for weak teeth.
(Bierce, 1958, p.)
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Voltaire called the purveyors of this sort of thing “Motto merchants.” He was himself no
mean inventor of aphorisms, epigrams, and adages. Of course, little announcements have been
the cause of announcements, e.g. MacCaulay’s (Machiavelli) “Nothing is so useless as a general
maxim.”

E. B. White pokes gentle fun at quotations in “The Retort Transcendental.”
“Having bought, read, and reread” Walden, White slides into poetic response to the waiter who
asks him a direct question. Sample:

“Where y’ been all this time?” he (the waiter) asks.
“If a man does not keep pace with his companions,” I retort,
“Perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.”

Dorothy Parker (1944) put her hand in, in praise of Oscar Wilde:

If, with the literate, I am
Impelled to try an epigram
I never seek to take the credit;
We all assume that Oscar said it.

There is no real money to be made from collections of this sort, at least not yet. H.L.
Mencken, editor of one of the best of dictionary of quotations, took a shot in 1919, when
Mencken and his colleague Nathan plotted to support themselves in various ways.

“One was a plan to sweat some money out of the movies…and we proposed that one of
the companies….do a series based on the epigrams printed in the Smart Set.…we were to supply
…twelve Smart Set epigrams a week, and he (the company’s press agent) was to devise some
means of putting them on the screen. So far as I know, only one movie parlor in the whole
country every actually exhibited these illustrated epigrams, and it abandoned them after a few
weeks.”

“The $6,000 that I earned for the Smart Set by the epigram movie scheme tided the
magazine over a bad place, but it did not earn anything directly for Nathan or me, so we toyed
from time to time with other plans that would bring money into our privy purses.” Mencken
(Yardley) 1993 p. 304

An Army Lieutenant during World War II who turned English Professor after 1945, Paul
Fussell, is not so nice. In Wartime, he swats H.L. Mencken:

“One of the interesting events of the war was Mencken’s turn from lively satire and
attack to benign literary effusions as sentimental memoirs and treatises on the American
language and a dictionary of quotations.”(page 170)

Fussell pins the rap on the war.
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REFERENCES FOR THE PRECEDING AND FOR WHAT FOLLOWS

Adams, Douglas (1980) The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. York: Bantam Books.

Allen, (2007) Mere Anarchy. New York: Random House.

Andrews, Robert (with Kate Hughes) (eds.)﴾ 2003) The Pew Penguin Dictionary of Modern
Quotations. London: Penguin books

Anderson, P. (1970). Tales of the Flying Mountains. New York: Macmillan.

Anonymous (Unacknowledged). The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. Second Edition.
London: Oxford University Press, 1955.

Auden, W. H., & Mendelson, E. (2007). Collected Poems (2007 Modern Library ed.). New
York: Modern Library.

Bacon, F., Wright, W. A., Frowde, H., & Oxford University Press. (1880). Bacon: The
Advancement of Learning (Second ed.). Oxford: At the Clarendon Press.

Bailey, P. J., 1816-1902. (1845). Festus : A Poem. William Pickering,

Bais, S. (2005) The Equations: Icons of Knowledge. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard
University Press.

Bakalar, N. (1997). American Satire: An Anthology of Writings from Colonial Times to the
Present. New York, N.Y., U.S.A: Meridian.

Barley, Nigel (1992) The Innocent Anthropologist: Notes from a Mud Hut. New York: Henry
Holt and Company

Bartlett, John (?) A Collection Of Familiar Quotations. (Nonfacsimile edition). Secaucus, New
Jersey: Citadel press and New York window library/ philosophical library.

Bartlett, John / Beck, Emily Morison (Ed) (1968) Familiar Quotations: A Collector of Passages,
Phrases, and Proverbs Trace to their Sources in Ancient and Modern Literature.
Fourteenth edition revised and enlarged). Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown And
Company.

Barnett, J. (1981). The Firing Squad. Morrow.

Bernard, C. (1957). An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine. New York: Dover
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Bernstein, T. M. (1995). The Careful Writer: A Modern Guide to English usage. New York:
Simon and Schuster.
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Bierce, A. (1958) The Devil's Dictionary. New York: Dover Books.

Blake, W., Eaves, M., Essick, R. N., & Viscomi, J. (1993). The Early Illuminated Books.
London?;Princeton, N.J;: Princeton University Press.

Blake, W., Ellis, E. J., & Yeats, W. B. (1893). William Blake, Volume 2. New York: AMS Press.

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Brancati, F. L. (1989) The Art of Pimping. Journal of the American Medical Association. 262(1)
(July 7), pp. 1379 - 1381.
Butler, S. (1917). The Way of all Flesh. E. P. Dutton & Company.

Campbell, Donald T. (1975) Assessing the Impact of Planned Social Change. In Gene M.
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Carlin, George. (2004) When Will Jesus Bring the Pork chops? New York: Hyperion.

Carlyle, T. (1899). Critical and Miscellaneous essays. Oxford University.

Carroll, L. (1869). Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Boston: Lee and Shepard.

Cipra, B. (2000). Misteaks... and How to Find Them Before the Teacher Does : A Calculus
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Collison, R. and Collison, M. (Eds.). Dictionary of Foreign Quotations. New York: Facts on
File, 1980.

Compton-Burnett, I. (1955). Mother and son. New York: J. Messner.

Confucius, & Lau, D. C. (1979). The analects (lun yü). New York; Harmondsworth;: Penguin
Books.

Daniel, C. (1976). Applications of Statistics to Industrial Experimentation. New York: Wiley.

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