Nobody seems to look for anything these days, if my favorite newspaper, The New York Times, is any indication. A small selection from just a couple of days in April 2015:
- CIA analysts “poring over drone video feeds, satellite data, electronic intercepts of cellphone conversations and informants’ reports.”
- A writer “on her couch, poring over a new story.”
- Football coaches “poring over game film and scouting reports” before the draft (for players, not for combat).
- American “business and investment lawyers poring over the mash-up of laws in the existing trade embargo” of Cuba.
- Angora rabbit fans (who knew they existed?) “who spend time coddling the rabbits and poring over their pedigrees.”
- The South Korean government, “poring over private chats” in an invasion of privacy.
I’m not sure what to make of all this poring, which, by the way, is not related to climate change. “To pore over” is “to read or study carefully, in an attempt to remember,” according to one dictionary. That definition doesn’t seem to be the operative one lately. Instead, poring over is the new sifting through — checking a mountain of information for just the right fact. Not that sifting through has gone away entirely. I got more than 4000 hits when I searched for “poring” in the NY Times site, and a slightly higher number for “sifting through.” In the last two weeks, jurors were “sifting through” evidence in a high-profile murder case, a scholar was commended for “sifting through” early Modernist works, and an actor was depicted as “sifting through television and film scripts” in search of a new project. An employer was “sifting through resumes” and someone else was “sifting her memory for clues about her father’s secrets.”
And then there’s data mining. Can’t you just picture data miners, wearing reading glasses instead of helmets with those little headlights, poring over their algorithms, hoping to uncover something of value? The gold nugget, so to speak. Before data mining I often read about people massaging the data to find patterns. I’m not exactly sure what you do when you massage the data, but it sounds like a lot more fun than poring over or sifting through.
All these terms, though, mirror how overwhelmed we are. Documents, film, audio tapes, and rabbit pedigrees — how are we to keep up? The haystack keeps getting taller and the needle smaller. Me, I’ll just keep looking.
