The Volokh Conspiracy

One of the wonderful things about English is that it's a grass-roots language, and "standard English" is a myth. Effectively, if you use it, and someone understands you properly, then what you did was valid. Contrast that to languages with authoritarian "Royal Academy" type institutions. I remember when the authority for Spanish (if I remember properly, the Royal Academy of the Castillian Language) issued a decision, and suddenly between my 7th grade and 8th grade Spanish classes, a letter disappeared.

Or to use a more popular example... with the rules that govern the English language, Pluto would still be a planet.

I prefer the plural. I also prefer "dahta" to the grating "dayta". In my cause I plead Mr Lorenz Hart who rhymed "data" with "that-a is that-a". Youse goin' to argue wid a genius?

Life's little quesstions: Why does a sentence starting with "not to be pedantic......" always result in pedantry?

I always use "these data" with speaking about databases and the data therein. Otherwise I'm often lax.

Eugene, I'm not sure you can be permissive here while sticking up for "correct usage" anywhere else. Many dictionaries provide definitions for colloquial usage; however, defining a piece of grammar's correctness by whether or not it's common seems to be rather circular reasoning.

If you're willing to say that anything goes because English is a constantly mutating language, I don't think there's really a problem here. But it would seem from past posts that you're rather particular about certain grammatical rules. How can you decide what is "correct" and what is not?

This reminds me of my every 4 year peeve with watching the World Cup. It drives me nuts to hear Brazil are this and Italy are that. IS IS IS!!!

Play on . . .

I work in a field where we use the word data every day both internally and with customer sites. We say : need the data, get the data, look at the data, look in the data, collect more data. And I hear "data" said as dayta or dahta all the time. Nobody seems to care.

I agree with Steve2 100%.

"Correct" in the sense implying "not annoying to people who learned to write English from teachers who were trained during the era when strict prescriptivist notions about grammar (to a great extent derived from the original Fowler) were extremely common, and distinctions like the usage in question were widely considered to be a mark of good education and thus an indicator of social class."

Or was that a rhetorical question, intended to embarrass a commenter with outdated views regarding grammar (itself an indicator of age and/or status within a more limited social set of people with a certain kind of academic training)?

It's appropriate to have "datum" denote a single item of information, and "data" strictly denote a collection of items, becaause that makes it clear what you are talking about. Why blur a natural distinction?

Are there any news here?

Not a single new. Personally, when I deal with data, I use datorum.

GeoffBro: Can you please point me to specific posts in which I am "it would seem from past posts that you're rather particular about certain grammatical rules," at least as questions of correctness?

I'm pretty sure that most of my posts complaining about people's usage make clear that I'm condemning certain usage as inelegant or otherwise subjectively annoying to me (or, in certain situations, as confusing). I'm a fairly thoroughgoing descriptivist, and I doubt I've materially departed from this descriptivism in previous posts -- but if you can point me to specific posts, I can see whether in fact I erred in those posts.

But more broadly, I'm not saying here that the singular "data" is correct just because it's common. (I could argue this, but that's not my argument here.) Rather, I'm saying that even if one looks at the Authorities, the Authorities generally treat the singular "data" as correct. So the question isn't just whether something can be grammatically incorrect -- it's whether the commenter to whom I was responding has substantial support for his view that this particular usage is grammatically incorrect.

English is a language in which one can "correctly" say that something was "pretty ugly" or "terribly good." We have a /plural/ of /one/, for Pete's sake. ("Which do you want?"--"The red ones.")

Robert Emmet (I thought he was dead . . .) suggests the reason when he uses the dative: We have very few inflections in English. So our ears /want/ to hear the ones that we do have. So it's only luck if a word that doesn't end with -s stays plural.

So it's "data is." Because otherwise you're being annoying.

In the original slip opinion of Powell's concurrence in Bakke, one finds a quotation from a California court opinion stating "there is no empirical data" followed by a [sic]. The author of the California opinion published an op ed piece arguing for the permissive use of the singular verb. In the final reporter's version of the opinion, the [sic] was removed. So the Supreme Court appears to have ruled on this important issue.

Smokey: nope. "Datum" is a neuter noun of the second declension, but for the record:

nominative singular datum
genitive singular dati
dative singular dato
accusative singular datum
ablative singular dato

nominative plural data
genitive plural datorum
dative plural datis
accusative plural data
ablative plural datis

Unless you're making some kind of joke I don't get, in which case, never mind. Also, note "dative"--same root as "data"!

We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.

We interrupt this important program to bring you levity. The proper conjugation of the Latin word for, "to spit", is

spitto
spittere
ach
ptui!

NOW we return you to your regularly scheduled programming.

(It's my only 'good' Latin joke.)

theobromophile: I understood that he meant "in accordance with an acknowledged or accepted standard; proper: correct behavior." But the dominant view among those who are usually seen as enunciated the "acknowledged or accepted standard" seems to be that both the singular and the plural are correct.

So I take it the commenter doesn't mean "in accordance to the dominant view of the dictionaries." What "acknowledged or accepted standard" is he then appealing to?

EV: perhaps the second clause of the definition (i.e. "proper"), read in a very technical, archiac fashion? The commenter is likely referring to a select group, outside of the general population (for whom dictionaries are written*), who would use "datum" when referring to a singular measurement and "data" with multiple measurements.

I think the commenter partially answered the question with the first clause of the next sentence: "Perhaps it's old-fashioned,"** which implies that the singular usage of "data" has become acceptable grammar among the unwashed masses recently, but is nevertheless improper.

If/when I can find some older dictionaries, I'll look into this.

*After all, the word "ginormous" was recently added to the dictionary.

**Should this be hyphenated? I thought that nouns were not hyphenated (ex. "I am anal retentive"), whereas adjectives are hyphenated (ex. "That is a very anal-retentive statement").

**Should this be hyphenated? I thought that nouns were not hyphenated (ex. "I am anal retentive"), whereas adjectives are hyphenated (ex. "That is a very anal-retentive statement").

First, (and I swear I would not point this out if this was not a thread explicitly discussing grammar), "anal retentive" is not being used as a noun in the sentence "I am anal retentive"; "am" is a linking verb (in the terminology I learned) which connects an adjectival predicate to the subject, not a transitive verb taking a noun as its object.

But to answer the question, yeah I think that's a commonly observed rule, I guess the reasoning is in "old-fashioned music", the hyphen shows "old" and "fashioned" are not to be read as separate adjectives which both modify "music".

In another twenty years, Webster's will probably approve of the singular criteria and phenomena, which are becoming fairly common even in edited prose. A piece by a lawyer in an Indiana bar journal made criteria, which the author thought was a singular, into a plural by adding an apostrophe and an s. These changes may be inevitable, and someday the singular criteria and phenomena won't be errors, but the battle is still worth fighting. Data, though, is something I gave up on long ago. Perhaps even using apostrophes to form plurals will someday pass a usage panel.

given that "dative" is the case for someone to whom something is given.

I was taught that the dative case involved any sort of direction (i.e. going to somewhere) - perhaps my memory is fried? or is that merely an abtract version of "giving?" or does Latin work differently than Greek? (Greek has a vocative, not an ablative, FWIW.)

"The Yankees have good pitchers. New York has good pitchers."

except that they don't. why else would they bring back clemens?

(was that off topic?)

Years ago when I took some programming courses the professor was quite insistent that datum was singular and data was plural. He'd even dock marks on tests over it.

At the time, and IIRC, the dictionary backed him up. Data was a new word to most people, only just coming into popular usage as computers caught on, so presumably the standard rules applied.

But apparently the repeated usage of data as singular has, at least in the minds of those who write dictionaries, made it acceptable.

"The hoi polloi" = The the people

Redundant, if I remember correctly.

I mostly agree with Paul7. Language prescriptivism is a bad thing -- natural languages have no authorities over them; therefore they are defined by the consensus of most users. (I do not recognize exceptions even for government bodies such as the Académie Française, whose continuing efforts to hold back the tide accomplish nothing except to look foolish.)

But while I agree that a language is defined by its users, and that innovation of new words and usages exists and is valid, I also cannot accept the opposite extreme position, that there is no such thing as "incorrect" use of language. Once one accepts that there is no line to be drawn between correct English (or American) and gibberish, anything can mean anything; there is no longer any way to extract signal from noise, and communication comes to a complete halt. I'm not being facetious; I believe that (for instance) most rap music lyrics are so far down this slippery slope, they might as well be at the bottom.

I would like to see this chaos corrected, not by law but by market demand, especially in the three main areas where the marketplace used to (and many people still expect it to) take care of the problem:

1) The schools, especially grade schools. I believe teacher hiring, firing, and retention decisions should be based at least in part on a requirement that they use the language correctly, because kids will learn from their example.

2) When I was young, dictionaries were ridiculously prescriptivist (Webster's, for instance, would not accept "data" as a mass noun as long as Edwin Newman sat on their board, 20 years after it was widely accepted by the public). Now many dictionaries err in the opposite direction, but the damage has been done: dictionaries have lost their credibility by being too disconnected from reality for too long. They need to start monitoring public opinion (at least among the well educated) the way politicians do if they ever want to be taken seriously again.

3) Of late, TV and radio newscasters have become some of the worst offenders. Like teachers, they teach a lot of people by example whether they intend to or not, so their bosses ought to expect them to use words properly. I hear two kinds of error especially often in newscasts: sentences with no verb, and "suspect" used as a synonym for "criminal".

My agenda hold that data is always plural. People judge you by the words you use. The educated person will understand you when you say, as Bill Gates does, "One or more of your disk drives has errors on it," but he won't give you a job. Bill Gates, like George Bush, can continue to sound ignorant, because he owns the company.

This whole dispute reminds me of the famous anecdote about Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune, who insisted that "news" was plural. He once cabled a correspondent in the field: "ARE THERE ANY NEWS?" The correspondent cabled back: "NO NOT A SINGLE NEW."

When I was in fourth grade in the spring of 1957, I lost a spelling bee by spelling the word "datum": "datemn"--I knew I was screwed with the "e" and just ended with da--mn. I had made it all the way to city finals on University of Houston TV and lost to a four letter word.
I had not had any Latin in primary school and so did not understand sing/plural and besides, data was not a commonly used word as Sputnik had not even been orbited. In high school, I took two years of Latin which came in handy when I majored in biology in college.
Transitioning nouns to verbs can also be worrisome if one forgets that English is an evolving language. We teach Biology students that one of the reasons Latin is used to give scientific names to organisms because the language is "dead" so no new words can be added to the Latin dictionary.
"Data" has adapted to English rules of syntax via fifty years of common usage and slackage.

When was the last time you heard the word "datum"?

If you've ever bought a standard topographical map, you'll notice that the entire North American Geodesic Survey is considered a single datum.

"Data" can arguably be either plural or a collective singular noun. Anyone who says it is simply wrong to use "data" as singlular is, well, simply wrong.

If you are writing for a non-scientific audience, the singular will probably jar fewer people. If you are writing for a scientific audience, the plural will probably jar fewer people. Legal audiences are probably somewhere in between.

But irregardless of what you do, some pedantic fool will whine about your choice. So use "data" however it flows best for you.

P.S. Yes, I know "irregardless" is not a word.