I don't agree with Mark's analysis. He often cherry-..... his information, so you know that there is more to the story that he is not telling us.

English as a Second Language Single question discussions
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This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://english.best/questions/preview/11660-i-don-t-agree-with-mark-s-analysis-he-often-cherry-his-information-so-you-know-that-there-is-more-to-the-story-tha
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This is a great idiom.

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I also see it that way. It is interesting that there seems to be no equivalent in either German or Russian.

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…he often cherry-picks his information? Is that a possibility? By the way, it’s not my analysis and my name is MARC. :grinning:

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Yes, that’s right.

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(Regarding the lack of translations.)
That’s strange as this is not just a casual idiom but an important technical term.

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In Dutch there is an equivalent: cherry-picken. You can also say: selectief kiezen.

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I’ll chime in on this one. I use the term “cherry picking” a lot. I spend a lot of time pouring through statistics. I’ve also done a lot of political debate. Cherry picking is one of the most common errors people make.

I suppose it is an idiom, but as Arinker mentioned it’s an important technical term.

When you pick cherries, or any other fruit, you pick the good ones. You don’t pick the unripe cherries. You don’t pick the overripe ones. You don’t pick the ones full of bugs or have been pecked at by birds. So when you see cherries at a store, they are not a representative sample of cherries. Therefore you can’t draw any conclusions about cherries from the ones you see at the store.

So the term derived from literally picking cherries. Other languages might not have the term cherry picking, but they certainly have the same concept. It’s one of the most important things to consider when looking at statistics, and one of the most common errors.

It’s not always obvious that it’s about statistics. The news is a good example. The news, by it’s very nature, is cherry picking. We don’t see what’s normal in the news. We only see the exceptions. We see what happens with one in a million people. That’s what we call news. But over time we see it over and over again. After a while the abnormal begins to seem normal.

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Exactly, I’ve read about it.

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I thought about it again, and yes, there is an equivalent in German, it’s “Rosinenpicken”.

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