Word Court: Wherein Verbal Virtue Is Rewarded, Crimes Against the Language Are Punished, and Poetic Justice Is D by Barbara Wallraff

Author:Barbara Wallraff [Wallraff, Barbara]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Language, Arts & Disciplines, Linguistics, Non-Fiction
ISBN: 9780544109933
Google: vS8ACtwswOgC
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 2012-09-23T23:00:00+00:00

Data

A demon that haunts me is the use of data as a singular noun. I realize this is a losing battle, but I still would like to see a few more shots fired from my side. When I first encountered this usage, it was from people I thought of as illiterates, and I was inclined to write them off. Now I see it in daily newspapers as well as in technical journals. It’s wrong, wrong, wrong, and I implore you to say so in public.

Using data as a singular is wrong. It’s also unnecessary, because the word works fine as a plural, and because we have alternatives to it, such as the plural statistics and the singular information. But people keep getting data wrong because their English-speakers’ ears don’t necessarily hear the Latin -a ending as plural. Even the plurals of some words ending in -um that come to us from or via Latin are now typically formed in English with an s: albums, condominiums, gymnasiums, mausoleums, stadiums, and vacuums are examples that come to mind. And agenda is a onetime plural that is now almost invariably regarded as singular, having the plural agendas. Be that as it may, “The datums are in,” of course, sounds much worse than “The data is in.”

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