English Language & Usage Asked by user19267 on March 30, 2021
I have a bunch of events that vary in duration and also vary in how recently they occurred. I want to graph these events so that they look like a typical bar graph, with all the bases resting on the X axis and the Y axis representing time. This way it will be easy to see which events lasted longer than other events (the taller the bar, the longer the duration of the event). But I also want to express how far in the past each event took place. More recent events would be closer to the origin than the ones further back in history.
I think "duration" is a good label for the Y axis, with "hours" being the unit of measure. As for the X axis, I’m having a harder time deciding on a way to describe the property that it will represent. The units of measure will be "days", but I want a word or short phrase to use on the X axis similar to the way "duration" characterizes the Y axis. The best I could come up with is "temporal proximity".
Does this work, or is it going to sound stilted, contrived, pedantic… etc.?
I don't have a problem with "temporal proximity", but recency would make sense to me. However, this dictionary definition only gives a qualitative rather than a quantitative definition. On the other hand, the Cambridge Dictionary gives
the fact of being recent, or the degree to which something is recent
(emphasis added). (If I were making this graph I might add "(days since event)" as a subtitle ...)
However, if we're being really picky and you're plotting the x-axis in terms of increasing "days since event", then you should consider temporal distance rather than proximity — and I can't think of a good substitute for "not-recency" ...
Correct answer by Ben Bolker on March 30, 2021
No, it is not an effective label. It does sound stilted and contrived, but worse than that it's unclear what it means. Ideally you want figures to be as self-contained and self-explanatory as possible. As a reader, "temporal proximity" would annoy me because I would have to look away from the figure and hunt in the caption or text to figure what it meant.
Personally, I would write something like "Days since event". This sounds more natural and is much easier to interpret than "temporal proximity."
Answered by d_b on March 30, 2021
Have you considered age or a variant like "age(days)" or "age in days"?
M-W:
age noun
1 c: the length of an existence extending from the beginning to any given time
Answered by alwayslearning on March 30, 2021
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