Re: "Data don't"

T.H. Entity <gguiri@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
dontbother <dontbother@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrought:
T.H. Entity <gguiri@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
dontbother <dontbother@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrought:

Here's a mildly interesting sentence that follows the AP style
manual discussed by Bill Walsh.

"Ultimately, the technology could displace the RAM found in PCs,
enabling systems that boot up immediately because data don't have to
be reloaded into the memory chips."

There are still some careful journalists out there.

http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/ptech/07/10/magnetic.memory.ap/index.html

Rather than careful, I'd call it forced to the point of high
archness. If the writer has accepted the use of "technology" to
replace the former "device" or "invention", plus the acronym "RAM",
plus the initialism "PCs", plus the jargon verb "boot up", plus the
relative neologism "memory chip", you'd think they (ho ho) would
also have managed to swallow their (ho ho) pride and come to terms
with the now-standard-in-IT-contexts non-count use of "data".

We'll have to agree to disagree on this point. In medical journalism,
most publishers still insist on treating "data" as a plural. I have no
trouble with this usage, and it's certainly not archness on my part. I
don't think there's any necessary relationship between accepting
'"technology" to replace the former "device" or "invention", plus the
acronym "RAM", plus the initialism "PCs", plus the jargon verb "boot
up", plus the relative neologism "memory chip"' and using "data" as a
singular or a plural. At the moment, it's still in dispute, so it's
optional.

'Fess up Franke. Would you expect to see "a CD-ROM contains fewer data
than a DVD" in the mainstream media? I certainly wouldn't, and I'm
confident people interested enough in computers to read news stories
about them wouldn't either.

No, you're right about this. In this case, we treat "data" like money or
time or volume of, say, medicine in a dose: "Five dollars is not a lot of
money", "two hours is long enough", and "Three microliters is too much
for a mouse but not for a rat". A CD holds less data than a DVD, and an
HD_DVD will hold less data than a Blu-Ray DVD. But I know enough to make
a choice in this circumstance. Just as I would when deciding that
singular "they/their" is better than "his or her" or rewriting the entire
sentence.

While I was waiting for my son at the local library today, I found one of
the few English books on the shelves there. It contained some English
essays from a linguistics conference. One paper was talking about how one
hundred years ago, linguists called Latin the "most developed language"
in the world and Chinese the least because the former is inflected and
the latter is analytic. Now, according to the essay, Chinese is called
the most developed --- with English a close second because it's lost most
of its inflections --- and Latin the least. It might be nice if English
were to lose these singular/plural inflections, but it ain't gonna happen
any time soon, even though this particular inflection is a Latin form.

I
respect the choice of those who use it as a plural and deride the
choice of those who use it as a singular, even though I know that
they usually don't know enough about their own language to actually be
able to make the choice -- it's all that they know.

I agree and disagree. If people want to use the word "datum" and have
"data" as its plural, more power to their elbows. However, it is a
glaringly evident fact that in IT contexts, "data" is used as a
non-count noun that means "digital information". It's a specialised
use that is now all but universal, and claiming that it's incorrect is
as wind-pissily pointless as claiming that that British computers
should run "programmes" instead of using a barbaric foreign spelling.

No, I don't think so. Programmes and programs are merely variant
spellings belonging to two different dialects. Data (sing.) and data
(pl.) are two different ideas and not reflective of different dialects
but of different fields. In any case, I didn't say anything about how IT
people should use "data", only that one should generally not trust an IT
person's sense of how English should be used. In the sentence from the
CNN.com article, either way, singular or plural, is perfectly fine. It
doesn't sound silly the way "A CD holds fewer data than a DVD" does.

I get a couple of IT newsletters every week, and I have to say that,
generally, native anglophone IT people are some of the worst writers
I've ever come across. They make every error in the book and seem so
blithely unaware of languages that don't compile that citing how they
use "data" is ludicrous, not merely unpersuasive.

Again, from your viewpoint and experience, where "data" means "more
than one datum", then it may indeed be ludicrous. When, however, it
conjurs an image that is not plural -- i.e. we don't think of a
collection of individual zeroes and ones -- but rather one of a block
of "stuff" (as with sand or sugar; who thinks about plural grains?) --
then making it non-count makes perfect, unobjectionable sense.

In medicine, we don't deal with zeroes and ones but with numbers and
stains etc. They are discrete and not blocks of substratum that turn into
images or words on an LCD or CRT. I don't see that this is any different
from Brits saying "the company/government/family/team are unhappy about
the ruling" and Yanks saying "is unhappy". I accept either one, but I
respect people who are able to make the choice. We can make the choice,
but someday, probably, we won't be able to because too many speakers will
have eliminated it. That will be fine, because I will be dead by then.

--
Franke: EFL teacher and medical editor
Unmunged email: /at/hush.ai
Native speaker of American English, posting from Taiwan
It's all in the way you say it, innit?
.