I’ve been using Duolingo to study Latin, which is an interesting experience. Bright colors! Duo, the Owl of Encouragement! And some serious gamification of language learning. They also nag you gently if you they detect that you haven’t done your daily lesson:
In this regard they know what they’re doing, as described by a term I learned recently: the Ebbinghaus curve. Hermann Ebbinghaus was a German psychologist who did early empirical work on memory. More specifically, he worked on how we lose what we’ve learned, and he developed a model that shows that we forget more and more (retain less and less) over time1:
As you can see, the graph maps percentage retained against time, with a curve that shows that as more time elapses, retention approaches zero. This is also called—more memorably (haha) but less colorfully—the forgetting curve.
How can you prevent learned material from fading away toward nothingness? Well, that’s why the Duolingo people nag you: you can fight the Ebbinghaus curve by repetition and review. If you do that, the curve is reset, so that it looks like this:
(I note that the curves on the two graphs have different slopes, hmm.)
I like having a kind of fancy name for a process that’s sadly familiar to most of us. At least the next time someone asks me about something I learned long ago, rather than saying “I forgot,” I can say “Sorry, I Ebbinghaused that.”
Origins! Not only do I poke around at learning Latin, I consume vast quantities of British crime dramas on TV. A word that comes up often is alibi, and eventually I started wondering where exactly that came from. It’s relatively easy to guess that it must come from Latin, since so much of our legal vocabulary is from that language. True?
Yes. (My etymological hunches of late have been pretty poor.) In the legal sense, an alibi is a defense stating that a person could not have committed a crime because they were somewhere else when it happened.
And indeed, alibi in Latin means “elsewhere.” The Latin etymology is sort of interesting. The -bi part is a “locative” particle that also shows up (ok, obscurely) in the term ibidem, usually abbreviated ibid., in old-school footnotes or bibliographies when you want to say “in the book/paper/chapter/page/etc. that I just mentioned.”
The ali- part means “other, another” and is related to words like alien, alter, parallel, and else. So alibi is literally “[an]other place,” which is where the suspect was at the time. (“I was at home watching Netflix, detective.”)
A question, of course, is whether I will remember the origin of alibi. Or the plot of the many detective series I’ve watched. Should I be in danger of forgetting, of course, I know what to do.
1 If you think that using US college students for psychological experiments is WEIRD, consider that Ebbinghaus tested his theory on a population of one, namely himself.
Like this? Read all the Friday words.