"Plural of anecdote is data" (Ray Wolfinger)

[Mark A. Mandel]

Fred Shapiro writes:

        >>>
What is interesting about this saying is that it seems to have morphed
into its opposite -- "Data is not the plural of anecdote" -- in some
people's minds.  Mark Mandel used it in this opposite sense in a private
e-mail to me, for example.
        <<<

To the best of my recollection, I learned it in the negative form and had
never heard it in the positive form until discussing it with Fred in
private e-mail.

Both forms make sense to me, with somewhat different and non-opposite
meanings -- that's the devil in trying to draw wisdom from aphorisms. The
positive form means something like "Data is built up from individual data
points." The negative form means something like "It's unsafe to generalize
from one or a small number of unsystematically collected pieces of data." I
agree with both, and I suspect that most readers of this list do likewise.

-- Mark A. Mandel
[This text prepared with Dragon NaturallySpeaking.]