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Even further off-topic, but possibly a lucrative money makerEven further off-topic, but possibly a lucrative money makerPosted Oct 8, 2008 7:23 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304)In reply to: Even further off-topic, but possibly a lucrative money maker by pr1268 Parent article: Stallman vs. Clouds (Linux Journal)
Some of these things I too would consider errors. But
singular-number 'data'? What you're complaining about there is that the word has lately been absorbed into the language and now follows the standard rules of regular English nouns, pluralized with -s. Just because some Latin-heads would rather English worked differently and treated 'data' as if it were still living in Latin doesn't change the fact that this is what native speakers *do* to words that don't follow the rules. It might take a few centuries but words eventually get regularized. Even ancient irregulars like 'wrought' eventually fall (and new irregulars rise, of course, the number will never fall to zero).
Even Fowler's documents that particularly 'in computing and allied
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Even further off-topic, but possibly a lucrative money maker Posted Oct 8, 2008 8:40 UTC (Wed) by njs (subscriber, #40338) [Link]
Whoa, I was rolling my eyes at that whinge for a different reason -- in my dialect, 'data' has become a mass plural, not a singular, so I say "this data", "lots of data" (compare, say, "sand" or "corn"). I would say "datums" in certain circumstances (compare "grains of sand"), but I can't say "datas" at all. You know people who pluralize it with -s?
Even further off-topic, but possibly a lucrative money maker Posted Oct 8, 2008 20:19 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
Amazingly, yes. It still sounds wrong to me, but no longer very wrong.
It's a mass noun to me, but not to everyone.
Even further off-topic, but possibly a lucrative money maker Posted Oct 8, 2008 22:39 UTC (Wed) by njs (subscriber, #40338) [Link]
How odd. The standard in academia, on the other hand, remains "data" as a count plural, with people saying "these data" etc., which I am slowly getting used to myself. So all three possibilities are attested in the wild.
I don't know what this has to do with cloud computing, but at least it's more interesting than the top part of the thread...
Even further off-topic, but possibly a lucrative money maker Posted Oct 10, 2008 4:47 UTC (Fri) by alfille (subscriber, #1631) [Link]
Actually, Steven Pinker's ¨Words and Meaning¨ points out that irregular verbs are few (<200) but account for 40% of the verbs used in common speach. Essentially, we preparse and cache them, so we don't need the rules.
Even further off-topic, but possibly a lucrative money maker Posted Oct 10, 2008 8:12 UTC (Fri) by njs (subscriber, #40338) [Link]
That's exactly the problem -- high-frequency words can get away with irregularity, and the higher the frequency the more irregularity they can get away with (is/am/be/are/was/wtf?). But "data" isn't high frequency at all, so speakers are normalizing it to the usual English rules.
Even further off-topic, but possibly a lucrative money maker Posted Oct 11, 2008 2:50 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
The English title of this book is _Words and Rules_.
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