[tz] [PATCH] The word "data" is plural.

Russ Allbery eagle at eyrie.org
Wed Aug 13 03:08:02 UTC 2014


This is a somewhat more debated topic than the short commit message, so I
thought I'd drop a couple of URLs in here for other perspectives, in case
anyone is curious.  (I don't care one way or the other how it's used in
the tz archive, and am happy for Paul to follow his own personal
preference, but I find the general topic interesting.)

The question is whether data is still treated as the plural of datum, or
whether it's converted into being a mass noun in its own right.  It
clearly started as the plural form of a count noun originally, but it's
increasingly being used as a mass noun.  My personal sense is that the
movement towards data as a mass noun is substantial and has a great deal
of momentum, and that in a few more decades it will be entrenched as a
mass noun.

http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2012/07/more-data-please
http://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/is-data-singular-or-plural

Re-running the ngram in the first URL shows a very similar graph as two
years ago:

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=data+is%2Cdata+are&year_start=1900&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cdata%20is%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cdata%20are%3B%2Cc0

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)              <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>



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