A Fistful of Datums

From a post by David Henderson on EconLog, behold, my signature pet peeve in all its glory:

Any claim we make based on aggregate data is only as good as those data.

Emphasis mine; hypercorrection his.

Look, data is a mass noun. It just is. So stop using it like a count noun. TODAY. I don’t care that it’s a plural form in Latin. That’s as absolutely and totally irrelevant as the fact that pea used to be pease. Latin is a FOREIGN language – and dead as a doornail besides. And I don’t care that it’s “standard usage” in academia – because it isn’t, not really. It’s only standard usage by virtue of the fact that some people who happen to know Latin also happen to want to show off their education, and a lot of other people happen to be insecure about their own intelligence/learning and happen to feel the need play along for fear of being “corrected.” But if the agreeing item gets too far away in the sentence, these same people forget themselves and out comes the good ol’ common use mass noun. Don’t believe me? Apply the following test to the speech of someone who strikes you as consistent on “data-as-plural.” Has he ever:

(1) Used datum as a singular? Or does he prefer to use piece of data? Or maybe a datapoint?
(2) Said things like a few data? Or does he prefer some (of the) data? Not much (of the) data?
(3) Said “we gathered many data?” Or is it “we gathered a lot of data?”

I’m guessing none of the above. And OK, a few clever hanses will have slipped through and “corrected” themselves in even the ways outlined above, but in the overwhelming majority of cases, people, even academics, even those who took too much Latin in high school, don’t say things like these.

Data is already a mass noun in the general population, and there’s just no way it can hold out in academia forever. It requires people to memorize a special plural form that exists nowhere else, and for a lexical item that just isn’t that common outside of certain rarified environments. No, don’t give me that stadium and dictum crap. You have never, I don’t care WHO you are, in your life said “dicta.” You just haven’t. Maybe it came time to say it once, and you thought you could go through with it, but there at the end you lost your nerve. Admit it. And as for stadia, maybe you might have gotten away with that once or twice, but only because you manufactured the context. ‘Cause let’s face it, sport, it just doesn’t happen very often in the real world that you get to talk about more than one in the same sentence. And phenonmenon/a is NOT the same thing. That one’s a success story – I don’t know why, but it is. But in any case, that dog just won’t hunt, because on/a isn’t the same paradigm.

So stop it. Start stopping it today. People may think you’re stupid, but you get the last laugh – after all, I’ve just told you how to prove they’re being pompous. Have a good day. (Or a well day, if you insist on being a git.)

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