The Lemon Fool

In my poor understanding of the grammar it is not a choice between singular and plural but uncountable and plural.

-"the data is ..." considers data as "stuff" where the individual items are not of consequence.
-"the data are ..." draws attention to the fact that you are talking about multiple items.

In my experience uncountable is overwhelmingly preferred these days.

If you want the singular then it is "datum" as pointed out by others, not "data".


GS

GoSeigen wrote:If you want the singular then it is "datum" as pointed out by others, not "data".

A simple way to get around the use of the clumsy and rather archaic sounding word "datum" is to instead use "data item" e.g

"There is only one data item available and it indicates X"

I hear the more modern phrases "data item" and "data point" used far more than "datum".

The thing with data is that it is what you use to back up a theory and, in general, no one item of data will ever achieve that. So "data" is the common phrase because there rarely is only one item of data if you wish to credibly prove something.

Lootman wrote:A simple way to get around the use of the clumsy and rather archaic sounding word "datum" is to instead use "data item" e.g

"There is only one data item available and it indicates X"

Clumsier, I would have said.

"I am slicing a bananas item with a knives item."


Julian F. G. W.

jfgw wrote:

Lootman wrote:A simple way to get around the use of the clumsy and rather archaic sounding word "datum" is to instead use "data item" e.g

"There is only one data item available and it indicates X"

Clumsier, I would have said.

"I am slicing a bananas item with a knives item."

For my sins I spent a fair bit of my career working on data sources for trading desks and fund managers. We would always use the term "data item" for any individual field of information. And "data" for the collective term. And database for the repository of all that data.

In a couple of decades I don't think I ever heard anyone say "datum" and there probably would have been some raised eyebrows if they had.

I think the IT revolution may have changed the use. I also increasingly see the use of "data point" to show a discrete piece of pertinent information.

GoSeigen wrote:-"the data is ..." considers data as "stuff" where the individual items are not of consequence.
-"the data are ..." draws attention to the fact that you are talking about multiple items.
GS

Extend that to phrases where singular or plural are implied: "the data shows" vs "the data show". Some of us like to get that right too.

But my data am suggesting a lost cause.

UncleEbenezer wrote:

GoSeigen wrote:-"the data is ..." considers data as "stuff" where the individual items are not of consequence.
-"the data are ..." draws attention to the fact that you are talking about multiple items.
GS

Extend that to phrases where singular or plural are implied: "the data shows" vs "the data show". Some of us like to get that right too.

But my data am suggesting a lost cause.

Myself think (or should it be thinks?) you missed my point. The "data shows" implies uncountable, not singular. IMO.


GS

Lootman wrote:A simple way to get around the use of the clumsy and rather archaic sounding word "datum" is to instead use "data item" e.g

Data item it is. If any pedant questions it, tell them that datum is a slipshod contraction of data item and hope that they have forgotten their Latin

I prefer "item of data".

TJH

UncleEbenezer wrote:I use data as plural, but accept also singular usage.

Practitioners of GIS perpetrate an altogether worse abomination: namely, "datums" as a plural.

Um... Is it wrong?

e.g. 'person', 'persons', 'people', 'peoples'?

I'm a bit schizophrenic about this one: in a technical computer context, I tend to treat "data" as a collective term that often gets treated as singular grammatically (even though it's plural etymologically), while in less technical contexts, I tend to treat it as the plural of the little-used singular "datum" (in both cases, "tend to" because there is some spillover between them). Part of the reason for that is that in the technical environment, how many data items make up your data is rather indeterminate: for instance, if a web page asks me for my name and I answer "David", how many data items have I entered? I can think of easy reasons to believe the answer is any of 1, 5, 6, 40 or 48, and rather more outdated ones for a number of other answers... Another part of the reason is that my father treated it as the plural of "datum", and the influence lingers...

Even without that contextual distinction, though, there are examples of that sort of distinction between a collective term, a genuinely plural term and a genuinely singular term. For example, in the following passage:

"The meat Sally's shop sells is all organic. The meats she likes are beef, pork and turkey, and the meat in her favourite recipe is beef."

the first "meat" is a collective term, covering all of the indeterminate number of types of meat her shop sells, "meats" is genuinely plural and the second "meat" is genuinely singular. There are also other examples of words that are etymologically plural but have become likely to be treated as singular grammatically, in at least one case to the extent of then having a plural formed from it: "The agendas for the next five meetings are attached."

By the way, there's at least one other case in which I'm schizophrenic about something depending on whether it's in a technical computer context or some other type of context: I talk about "computer programs" and "television programmes".

Gengulphus

richfool wrote:I would want to use data as the singular or plural (though I see it as a set of information).

Staff is another word which I have always used as a plural, but I often see it used as a singular. The staff were very attentive and the staff was very attentive. I guess because one can argue it is a collective, rather than lots of individuals.

Staff is singular, the plural is staves