Parsimony

Parsimony is a word that sounds like a spice you might keep in your kitchen, but it also has a negative connotation in today’s world.

If you say someone is parsimonious, you’re implying that they’re a bit like Ebenezer Scrooge—or at least like Scrooge McDuck, who was at least kind to his nephews most of the time. A parsimonious person is particularly principled with the payments in which they participate—potentially pedantic penny pinchers, perhaps.

The word parsimony hasn’t always had this negative slant. In Roman times, the word parsimonia meant something more like frugality or thrift than Scroogeness, but it’s easy to see how frugality can slide into parsimony under the right circumstances. Parsimonia was a descendent of parsus, the past participle of parcere.

One way that parcere is translated is to spare, meaning deliberately withholding something. Note that this is totally neutral and could be positive or negative depending on the context. I certainly want my dentist to spare me the discomfort that an unnecessary root canal would bring, and you keep a spare tire in the back of your car in case you get a flat.

Parcere and its noun counterpart parcimonia didn’t only refer to money or material wealth. You could be judicious about your use of resources (frugal), or you could be just and merciful. Either way, you were generally pretty cool if you were practicing parcimonia.

Parcimonia in Latin became parcimonie in French, and by the 1500s, the word had been adapted into English as parsimony. Here’s where the word took on the meaning I want to use today, as proto-scientists began to drive toward the scientific method by applying this concept to data and information.

The term scientist would not be defined for another three hundred years, but in the meantime, natural philosophers were discovering new methods of thought that would lead to an explosion in discoveries and a new way to look at the world. This method of thought had been described by William of Ockham even earlier:

The concept goes like this: if there are two competing explanations for something, the one that is less complicated is more likely to be right. The razor idea came about to imply shaving away anything extra.

This wasn’t a new idea when William started writing about it in the 14th century, but he did talk about it a lot. The concept is also called parsimony, and you might occasionally hear someone say they need to parse a large amount of information to simplify it.

I love this! Parse, parsimony, parsimonious… most of all, I remember playing a game called Parsec as a kid. I can’t help but think about this Texas Instruments version of Defender whenever I hear the words parse or parsimony. Here’s a Star Wars-ified version of the game in GIF form:

I could have been more parsimonious with that detail, but this place is called Goatfury Writes, not Goatfury Parses, so let’s move on.

There was not yet a scientific method, but there was this idea to parse those less likely theories, pruning them from the body of possible explanations one might consider. Simpler explanations frequently won out in educated circles.

Gradually, the scientific method took hold around the world, and human knowledge has multiplied a thousand times over ever since then.