I’m reading Leland Wilkinson’s The Grammar of Graphics at the moment. One of the unexpected delights of the book is the richness of its vocabulary, and the resultant enriching of my own vocabulary through reading it. Now I’m just waiting for the opportunity to observe to someone that their data looks heteroscedastic and their plot surprisingly ogive. Anyway, while reacquainting myself with the definition of “etiology”, I stumbled across the word that I had misremembered as “ateliorate”. It is, in fact, “etiolate”: literally, to make (a plant or person) pale by the exclusion of sunlight; figuratively, to “cause to lose vigour or substance” (Shorter OED). A day too late, alas, for use in my ADCS reviews…
Tags: Ogive
I met Leland Wilkinson once (his daughter is a mathematician at Northwestern, and a good friend of mine). He was very well-spoken in person. I committed the (perhaps forgivable) faux pas of saying how much I had enjoyed “The Visual Display of Quantitative Information” . . .