Metaglossia: The Translation World

WHETHER "data" is singular or plural is one of those hardy perennials of usage debate in which both sides have impossibly entrenched positions. Or so I had thought, but the Wall Street Journal has, as of today, taken an unusually fence-sitting position:

Most style guides and dictionaries have come to accept the use of the noun data with either singular or plural verbs, and we hereby join the majority.As usage has evolved from the word’s origin as the Latin plural of datum, singular verbs now are often used to refer to collections of information: Little data is available to support the conclusions.Otherwise, generally continue to use the plural: Data are still being collected.(As a singular/plural test, try to substitute statistics for data: It doesn’t work in the first case — little statistics is available — so the singular is fails to pass muster. The substitution does work in the second case — statistics are still being collected – so the plural are passes muster.)
I admire the attempt to satisfy both tradition and change, but it does leave some leeway that I can imagine many writers having a hard time handling. People crave hard and fast rules: they don't have time to make judgments all the time, like the suggested route of substituting "statistics". (This is the first time I've heard of this remedy, for what it's worth.)

But hard-and-fast doesn't always work, as I noted in my last submission on "data". We don't use the foreign morphology of every word brought from a foreign language. But we do sometimes. Since that last post, I have found this excellent one supplying some new counterarguments against always-plural "data". Among them: we certainly don't use "agenda" and "stamina" in the plural, though they have come to us the same way "data" has. (If your boss ever does say "moving on to the next agendum", let us know.) The "media" question remains mixed: some have it singular, others have it plural.

We have a strong urge to just have language behave, but regular readers of this column know that, as the original Johnson knew, it just won't. He famously said that "to enchain syllables, and to lash the wind, are equally the undertakings of pride". Less well known, but perhaps more to the point, he pointed to the unruliness of language as the sign of a healthy culture constantly enriching itself:

I blog weekly about the nuts, bolts, and idiosyncrasies of language. We’ve been up and running for almost five months, and our readers are starting to take stock. Some of you love what we write; some of you hate some of it; some express sorrow or confusion. You can’t please all the people all the time, but I wonder if what we have here is not just the old argument between prescriptivists and descriptivists, but a deeper unease as to who ought to discuss the language we all, in one way or another, use.

Le Monde.fr - Dans la grammaire, le masculin l'emporte sur le féminin. Cette règle qui régit l'accord de l'adjectif exaspère les féministes. L'Académie française acceptera-t-elle de la réformer ?

Esta publicación tiene por objetivo clasificar gramaticalmente las palabras y alocuciones para definir su etimología por medio de citas textuales, que refieren el uso y significado del vocablo.

What follows is not a comprehensive guide to the many uses of commas, but a quick tour of the most common errors involving them.

The first thing to note is that the comma often marks a brief pau...