Lost in Translation

We’re warned to take eyewitness accounts with a grain of salt. Humans are very good at pattern-matching, and we’ll often make up details to support our memory’s version of a story – or even completely reverse details: an eyewitness to a car accident might, for example, say that he saw Bob get out of the Subaru’s passenger seat to look at the damage caused by the Mazda when, in fact, Bob was a passenger in the Mazda and never came close to the Subaru. Memory and perception are funny things, and we can’t always rely on them to be accurate.

In browsing TV Tropes today (I won’t link, so as to save you from wasting the entire day), I came across the page for The Casey Effect. It’s a sports trope that dictates that fictional sports games invariably go down to the wire, with one final push, buzzer-beating shot, or last-ditch home run winning the game for the protagonists who were otherwise sure to lose. The page reminded me of a baseball game I’d watched about ten years ago: it was a Mariners game, where the opposing team had scored a large number of runs – 20 or more – in the early innings, but then the Mariners came back from behind in a massive rally that won them the game. I remember watching it at a friend’s house here in Richmond, and I remember all of us being sure that the Mariners couldn’t win the game, and getting more and more excited as they fought out a win anyway.

The trouble was, I couldn’t remember who they were playing or what date the game was on, or even what the final score was, and records of the Mariners’ seasons about that time didn’t mention a comeback like that. So I went hunting. I knew that the game had to be in 2001 – in 2000 I hadn’t met the friends I was watching the game with, and in 2002 I’d moved away before the beginning of the baseball season – so I went to the definitive baseball reference and started looking through each game of 2001, looking for a high-scoring, close-scoring game that involved the Mariners. After about half an hour, I found what must be the game in question: on August 5, 2001, the Cleveland Indians defeated the Seattle Mariners 15-14.

Wait, what?

According to my memory, the opposing team (the Indians make sense; since Cleveland is nearby, we had a reason to be watching the game) scored at least 20 runs early on, and then the Mariners came back from behind to win the game in a breathtaking rally. In reality, it was the Mariners who’d scored 12 runs in the first three innings; the Indians scored two in the fourth, but the Mariners scored 2 more in the fifth to re-establish their lead. The Indians then spent the 7th, 8th, and 9th innings tying the game – they were the home team, so they really did tie the game up in the bottom of the ninth – and then scored another run in the 11th inning to win. The majestic Mariners comeback that I’d been holding in my memory for almost a decade was actually a game where the Mariners had been the favored team – they were 18 games ahead of the Indians – and they’d lost the game.

Strange how our memories choose the wrong things to remember.

Because I think this is really incredibly cool:

English has nine directional/place words that indicate position in or movement regarding a place. Three of them we use pretty much every day; six have fallen into disuse, which is sad, because they’re pretty amazing words. To illustrate, imagine that you are standing at the other end of a football field from your good friend Bob. Francine, another friend, is moving around the football field:

• Position

  • Here means “in this place”. “Francine is here, next to me.”
  • There means “in that place”. “Francine is there, next to Bob.”
  • Where means “in what place”. “Where is Francine? I don’t see her.”

• Direction toward

  • Hither means “to this place”. “Francine is coming hither, from Bob to me.”
  • Thither means “to that place”. “Francine is going thither, from me to Bob.”
  • Whither means “to what place”. “Whither is Francine going? She’s off to the sidelines and running fast.”

• Direction away from

  • Hence means “from this place”. “Francine is going hence, from me to Bob.”
  • Thence means “from that place”. “Francine is coming thence, from Bob to me.”
  • Whence means “from what place”. “Whence is Francine coming? She just reappeared with a bucket of Gatorade…”

(Incidentally, this means that “from whence” is redundant. “Whence” already means “from where”.)

One of the most common “grammatical” arguments you will hear is “either something is unique or it isn’t! Something can’t be ‘very unique’!” To an extent, this is true. But – as will be apparent to anyone who has studied calculus and therefore dealt with degrees of infinity – there are also degrees of uniquity, which is a word I may have just made up to describe something’s quality of being unique.

Consider the following number sets:

1. {1,2,3,4,5}
2. {1,2,3,4,5}
3. {1,2,3,4,5}
4. {1,2,3,4,5,6}
5. {1,2,3,4,5,7,8}

Clearly 1, 2, and 3 are not unique among these number sets: each is duplicated exactly by another set.

Clearly 4 and 5 are unique among these number sets: each contains at least one number that is contained in no other set in the group. (A putative 6th set that lacked one number – say, {1,3,4,5} – would also be unique, because it didn’t duplicate another set exactly.)

However, 5 can be characterized as more unique than 4; that is, it has more characteristics that set it apart from the rest of the sets.

This opens the door.

Assume a group of sets with increasing variance from the baseline:

1. {1,2,3,4,5}
2. {1,2,3,4,5}
3. {1,2,3,4,5}
4. {1,2,3,4,5,6}
5. {1,2,3,4,5,7,8}
6. {1,2,3,4,5,9,10,11}
7. {1,2,3,4,5,12,13,14,15}
8. etc.

Each of the sets 4-7 is still unique, because no other set duplicates it. In addition, the more degrees of difference a set has from the baseline, the more unique it is. Therefore, by the standard established by 7 (the most unique of the listed sets, with four degrees of uniqueness), set 4 is only relatively unique (with only one degree of uniqueness). Set 6 is rather unique; and so on.

(Thank goodness I have this blog to absorb my random thoughts.)