The tutor that I will be submitting my assignment to prefers data to be plural.
Now, I am a linguistic liberal: I am not sure if there can ever be such thing as ‘correct’ usage and however you use the language is fine by me so long as I can observe it, I am a linguistic voyeur as well you see. And on top of that, I’m a linguistic democrat, I tend to go with my peer group if only to improve my chances of being understood.
So, I follow the usage of most people, and regard data as basically indivisible, like fog or rice. Thus: ‘the data is interesting’. Ok, I admit I use media in the plural, but you can still say medium and not be a complete arse-hole.
You see, I think that only someone whose datum is right up their rectum convolutes the English language like that and just such a datum-rectum-qantum-lorem-ipsum is teaching me this module and he has thrown a linguistic tantrum, and now so am I. How bloody dare he impose his linguistic quirks upon me? Just because he’s the teacher an’ has a doctorate an’ all.
I’m being oppressed by the patriarchy!
The question is, can I write a whole paper on research methods without using data as the subject of a verb?
I am quite tempted to say ‘the results we get datis’ and let him ablate on that.
Or ‘the implications datorum’.
Yeah.
I like that.
Decline on that genitive, datum boy!
