the.com/anecdote
Data's more charming cousin — one example, dressed up as proof.
means A short, personal story told to illustrate a point — entertaining, but not evidence of anything beyond itself.
from From Greek 'anekdota,' meaning 'unpublished things' — literally 'not' (an-) 'given out' (ekdotos). It first named the secret, juicy bits of history that writers left out of official records — most famously the gossipy unpublished chapters Procopius wrote about the Byzantine court, scandal too spicy for the main text. Over time 'anecdote' drifted from 'suppressed secret history' to just 'a short, telling story' — keeping the whiff of gossip, losing the censorship.
- origin
- greek for unpublished, literally secret stories
- danger
- memorable but statistically worthless
- plural of
- anecdote is not data, ironically
- best use
- illustrating a point, not proving one