100 YEARS OLD AND STILL SAVES ENERGY SLOTHFULLY...
LAST Friday, as I’m sure will not have escaped your notice, was International Sloth Day and I accordingly devoted a great deal of my time to pondering the matter.
The great Ambrose Bierce, in his Devil’s Dictionary, defines patience as ‘a minor form of despair, disguised as a virtue’. He does not define sloth but if he had done so, I imagine it would have been something like ‘a superior form of indolence, raised to the level of energy efficiency’.
International Sloth Day, however, was not about sloth but sloths, so you can forget about all that. For sloths are today’s topic, particularly the way in which they have broken into the public consciousness in recent years and attracted a vast slothophiliac following.
Much of this has been due to the work of zoologist, documentary film maker and founder of the Sloth Appreciation Society Lucy Cooke, whose YouTube videos from the Sloth Sanctuary in Costa Rica revealed to the world the utter adorability of baby sloths. She has been aided by the dedicated research work of Swansea student Becky Cliffe, whose many papers have shown how wrong people have been about sloths for centuries.
I have long seen these fine women as the joint goddesses, or at least high priestesses of the cult of sloth worshippers, and I thought I should encourage them with some figures that measure their success. I accordingly looked through our newspaper database to see how the number of references to sloths has grown since the millennium.
In the year 2000, I found, the number of newspaper articles including the word ‘sloths’ was only 20. (I chose ‘sloths’ incidentally, rather than ‘sloth’, in order to avoid including pieces about the deadly sin.)
Over the next decade, the numbers for each year were 44, 50, 31, 33, 33, 37, 42, 40, 29 and 21. In 2011, it was 22 but after that the number of sloths in the press has really taken off.
In 2012, it was 98, and the most recent years have seen 70, 104, 96 and an amazing 145 in 2016. So far this year, it is already well over 100.
Naturally, I wondered whether this might be merely a reflection of a growth in size of the database itself so I decided to find out, for comparison purposes, how many times the word ‘elephants’ occurred and to work out, for each year, the number of ‘elephants’ per ‘sloths’.
The results are conclusive proof of the growth in prevalence of sloths in the press. In 2000, there were 47 occurrences of ‘elephants’ for every ‘sloths’. By 2014, this had dropped to 20.33 ‘elephants’ per ‘sloths’, and the last two years have seen figures of 18.75 and 12.17. So far this year, there has been one ‘sloths’ for every 14.32 ‘elephants’.
Putting all the figures I obtained into an extrapolation program, I have worked out that if we use a linear extrapolation, the number of ‘sloths’ will exceed that of ‘elephants’ around July 2030, while quadratic and cubic extrapolations predict the even more startling June 2020 or May 2019. Go sloths!