It just rubs me the wrong way when I see sentences with the word Data treated as a plural. It doesn’t make sense to me. Data is like water - you add more, and it’s still data. You cut it in half, and you still have data.
Is a single survey a datum? It might include several fields such as a birth date. Is a person’s birth date a datum? It’s made of the year, month, and day. Are these individual items each a datum? The day is made of two separate digits. Each digit is made of a byte, which is generally 8 bits. Is the individual bit a datum? Well now we’re getting rediculous.
Someone else noticed that “agenda” was once the plural of “agendum”. Same with “media” plural for “medium”.
Whenever I hear someone use it speaking, I think it makes them seem overly pretentious and out-of-touch with the reality of actual analysis. Harsh, maybe, but it’s just my point of view.
I’m sure there’s at least one person out there that agrees with me… (and likely a few who don’t…)
Well, it depends on whether you want accuracy, or real-world usage. Datum is correct, but almost never used. As you say, how often does one have a single bit of information? In your hypothetical survey, each field would be a datum. The combination would be data.
[sub]I guess that should read “one person who agrees”.[/sub]
[sub]Ah, well, no post discussing grammar would be complete without an error or two.[/sub]
I use it, and “data”, practically every day. In my niche in the real world, the distinction is most definitely made. We also use, correctly Merriam-Webster assures me, “datums.”
In scientific journals, “data” is always plural. The word “datum” never appears. It’s largely obsolete, although apparently in Houston they still use it.
