Lumpers and Splitters
Lumpers and Splitters
[Megan and Cueball are standing looking at each other. There are boxes beneath each of them with a label.] Megan: Really, we're both just categorization pedants. Label: Lumper
Cueball: Ahh, so you're a meta -lumper. Label: Splitter

It is common to separate groups of things — species, people, languages, software models, etc. — into categories , but different people may do this in different ways. "Lumpers" work from the ground up by focusing on similarities among individual things to create larger categories, while "splitters" do the opposite, taking larger categories and trying to find characteristics that are not shared by all members of the group to further divide them into smaller subsets.
The comic points out the meta -ness of categorizing people based on how they categorize. It labels Megan and Cueball as those two types of categorizers. Megan, the lumper, describes herself and Cueball as both being "categorization pedants", lumping the two distinct categories "lumpers" and "splitters" into one. Cueball, the splitter, subcategorizes Megan into a more specific type of lumper: a "meta-lumper"—since the things Megan was lumping includes lumpers themselves—thereby splitting off lumpers from meta-lumpers. If Cueball further categorized himself he would be a meta-splitter.
The title text references the opening line of the novel Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy, which reads (as translated into English), "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Randall is drawing a parallel between this line and the lumper/splitter distinction because the line lumps one group of things (happy families) while splitting another group (unhappy families).
Additionally, this may be a reference to the podcast episode "Lingthusiasm Episode 60: That's the kind of episode it's - clitics" [1] , published a few days before the comic, wherein the hosts separate people into lumpers and splitters of clitics.
[Megan and Cueball are standing looking at each other. There are boxes beneath each of them with a label.] Megan: Really, we're both just categorization pedants. Label: Lumper
Cueball: Ahh, so you're a meta -lumper. Label: Splitter
