Extrapolation is a beautiful word. It comes from the Romany aggregation of the famous philosopher Extrapo Nemensis and the Latin –ation meaning “belonging to”. And they banged an “l” in between to make it scan nicely.

To me, it describes the amazing functioning of the human mind that, with enough data accumulated on a given situation, can predict/understand/act upon another, similar situation without having to know every particular of that latter situation.

As someone put it, imagine the relief of not having to check for gravity every morning before getting out of bed. And this does not mean that we know gravity “will be there”, we’ve just accumulated enough data about gravity to extrapolate that it’s not going anywhere. (Of course, I realise that if you have to get out of bed in the morning, you already know that gravity is pretty much switched on. Stop being persnickety!!)