Category: Writing

Anything on the process or results of writing as an activity and a passion

The grammar of data and datum

Sticklers for proper grammar are fond of pointing out how frequently people misuse the word ‘data.’ A ‘datum’ is singular; data are plural. The Economist Style Guide (a companion on my desk) explains:

Data and media are plural. So are whereabouts. Teams that take the name of a town, country or university are plural, even when they look singular: England were bowled out for 56.

Law and order defies the rules of grammar and is singular.

While this may be technically accurate, it has always clashed with my intuition – and not only because those who supposedly use the term incorrectly far outnumber whose who follow grammarian cant.

The question for me is whether ‘data’ is more like cats or more like water. The cats are increasingly annoyed about all this talk of grammar, but they remain distinct, countable, independent entities. The water, by contrast, is salty, ever-present, and part of an amalgamated mass. I may have seen Ghost in the Shell a few too many times, but the data-water equivalency long since became firmly entrenched for me.

Tricky bits of language

Frieze in Parliament

Living in Ottawa frequently involves encountering people speaking French. While I have been reasonably fluent at times, most of my felicity has been sapped by lack of use. There are many areas of grammar, syntax, and vocabulary that make me feel uncertain and amateur.

In English, there are relatively few such areas. Only two really stand out as perpetually confusing for me:

  1. I can never remember the proper use the subjunctive. I have never understood it, correctly structured phrases employing it still sound incorrect, and the Wikipedia entry is bewildering. As such, I avoid using the subjunctive altogether. I am in good company, at least. Somerset Maugham is reputed to have said: “The subjunctive mood is in its death throes, and the best thing to do is to put it out of its misery as soon as possible.”
  2. The other is the interaction of apostrophes and the letter ‘s’ in situations where words end in ‘s’ naturally. It gets no more confusing than when you have a word that always ends in ‘s,’ is being made plural, and is a possessive. For instance: “The different species’ characteristics can be easily distinguished.” I always feel inclined to say (and write) spee-sea-ze-ze-ze.

Without a doubt, I have looked up the proper usage of each of these dozens of times. The explanation is just very reluctant to stay in my brain. Not even reading Lynn Truss’ Eats, Shoots & Leaves has provided any lasting understanding.

Transitioning from transition

After a month on the job, this no longer feels like a “weblog in transition.” As such, I need to come up with a new secondary title. Given how it is the first piece of information most people absorb about the site – after a general appreciation for the layout and style – it is important to tune correctly. Given the diverse areas of interest explored here, I am not sure what would be most suitable. What I do know is that I don’t want it to mention my area of employment, because I do not to be an important feature of what happens here.

Do people have any suggestions? The cleverer the better. Work is also being done on a new banner.

Cognitive dissonance

One of the odd things about reading The Economist recently is seeing the extent to which their commitment to reason and the impartial consideration of scientific facts is clashing with their long-held views about economic growth. So far, their considerations of how ecological issues – especially climate change – impact their core philosophy has been fleeting and confined to the margins. This article on air travel is a good example.

Imagine, however, that they played some of the ideas through. What would their next Survey on Business look like if they really accepted that mass air travel is climatologically and morally unacceptable?

Ottawa blogs

Within a few months of arriving in Oxford, I had sorted out which blogs were worth reading. So far, I have not stumbled across any good Ottawa blogs. Does anybody know of any? Environment blogs, photo blogs, food blogs, travel blogs – all of these are potentially interesting. Personal blogs are better than pundit blogs. High quality writing is the key factor, along with some local information.

Uniqueness is binary

Towers in Ottawa

Reading through various climate change reports, I am reminded of a linguistic error that has long annoyed me. Specifically, it is the use of moderating adjectives before the word ‘unique.’ Uniqueness is fundamentally a binary distinction; the Hope Diamond and Mount Everest are unique because they are singular and irreplaceable things. It is logically nonsensical for something to be ‘fairly’ unique, and it is redundant to call something ‘completely’ unique. Likewise, it is impossible to be ‘quite uniquely situated.’

From a slightly broader perspective, it is worth noting how the prevalence of adjectives diminishes both the variety and power of nouns in language. This is particularly true for expressions of degree like ‘very’ and ‘extremely.’ I try to avoid them, though it cannot always be managed.

Proofread

This afternoon, my mother kindly passed along a list of 28 minor spelling and grammatical errors in my thesis. Curiously, there seems to be an direct correlation between the number of people who read a particular chapter and the number of errors. The same goes for the length of time that passed between writing and submission. 25 of the 28 errors are in the three chapters for which Dr. Hurrell gave me comprehensive feedback.

  • Chapter 1: 8 errors
  • Chapter 2: 9 errors
  • Chapter 3: 8 errors
  • Chapter 4: 1 error
  • Chapter 5: 2 errors

Chapter two was the single most edited of the lot, with 25 major revisions prior to the one submitted. This seems to confirm the Law of Editing: “For each correction or clarification made, an equal and opposite error will be inadvertently introduced.”

Since the thesis is 30,000 words long, the version that will reside in the Bodleian has about one error per thousand words. The PDF that I will put online once the thesis has been graded will be better, and probably more widely consulted. For those with access to the appropriate restricted pages on the wiki, the corrected version has been uploaded.