Mondayta: Presidential Heights

And a couple more things about December

[Trivia: can you name the 5 MLB teams in the American League Central division?]

So in line with “Mondayta,” here is a graph of the height of US presidents over time. I can’t actually claim credit for creating this (I found it on Wikipedia), but as soon as I came across it I knew I had to share it.

Presidents #22 and #24 seem to have exactly the same height as each other. What a funny coincidence!

What I particularly like about it is the fit of the approximating line across a lot of peaks and valleys: this is a scenario where observing the underlying data (always a necessary step) is important as always, but not immediately clear as to whether there’s a trend or not. So this is one scenario where running calculations and using derived figures reveals things for us: yes, there’s a trend upwards. There are even measures for just how firm a trend that is . . .

And on second glance, this chart doesn’t actually include either of our two most recent Presidents. Maybe I’ll redo it for next week, and also compute for myself just how firm a fit the line is. I think this is a good case study in fitting a line to a set of data (something that I’ve been wanting to write more about).

Also, there were two more points about December that I wanted to mention yesterday and forgot. One, the Star Wars character Lando Calrissian is portrayed by Billy Dee Williams, whose real middle name is actually “December.” “Dee” is just the vocalization of the initial. My two cents is that’s actually pretty cool for a name, at least a middle one.

Two, I wanted to share the beloved song “This Winter I Retire” by the (suitably) Vancouver-based indy rock band Said the Whale, a song I first heard wintering in snowy Michigan. They describe December not as bleak but as “long” and “cold.” This actually got me thinking about the exact meaning of “bleak,” if no other reason than to remind my brain that it is a real word and not (as it’s been seeming from my repeating it so many times) just a nonsense syllable.

Wiktionary separates its definitions into “without color, pale”; “desolate and exposed”; and “unhappy and cheerless.” Its etymology stretches back into Old English (from an older-still “Proto-Germanic” word), all of which meant some version of “bleak, pale, pallid, wan, livid; bright, shining, glittering, flashing.” What jumped out to me is that “bleak” had a cousin split off into “bleach”—a word that connotes all of the hyper-whiteness but none of the cheerlessness. But that’s appropriate for a word defined as “pale”: “pale” is a super-truncation of the Greek compound word “pan-leukon,” which means “all-white.” The generic adjectival ending “kon” got left off, and the n right before a different consonant got assimilated, as often happens. (“Irrelevant,” for example, means “not relevant” because the typical negating prefix in- had this happen to it.)

So “pale” means “all-white,” which is also what “bleach” means, and if that all-white quality comes along with feelings of being, say, “long and cold,” the relevant cousin word is “bleak.”

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Answer: the Cleveland Guardians, Detroit Tigers, Chicago White Socks, Minnesota Twins, and the Kansas City Royals.