Claudia Stanny wrote: "Speaking for myself, reading "the data is" makes me cringe, grind my teeth, and reach for a very sharp red pencil! ......... When I read "data" a part of me always substitutes words like numbers, observations, findings."
Claudia, is it possible that you are a long lost sister of mine? Our grammatical sensitivities seem to be identical.. Let's check this hypothesis of grammatical kinship with one more pet peeve: It annoys me no end when someone says e.g., "less people buy American-made cars." To my mind, it should be "fewer people." If the referent occurs in discrete units (e.g., people, cars, trees, doillars, etc.) you use the adjective "fewer." But if the referent is a more general concept or continuous, less discrete you use the word (water, forest, money) "less." So there are fewer trees and there may be less forested land. There are more people chasing fewer dollars but more people chasing less capital. This seems obvious to me but it is so often breached that I'm beginning to question myself. It's so common to have a colleague say "I have less students in my class this semester." Or a newscaster says "The U.S. sold less cars this year." This jars my grammatical sensibilities. So.............. am I the only one who gets irked by this issue? Surely my purported grammatical soul mate, Claudia must have the same reaction. Ed Edward I. Pollak, Ph.D. Department of Psychology West Chester University of Pennsylvania Office hours: Mondays noon-2 & 3-4; Tuesdays & Thursdays 8-9:15 & 12:30-2 http://home.comcast.net/~epollak/home.htm ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Husband, father, grandfather, biopsychologist, & bluegrass fiddler...... in approximate order of importance. From: Claudia Stanny <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> Speaking for myself, reading "the data is" makes me cringe, grind my teeth, and reach for a very sharp red pencil! :-) [just recently finished editing a slew of "data .... is" constructions to "data .... are" in a colleague's prose] When I read "data" a part of me always substitutes words like numbers, observations, findings. All plural (so far). --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [email protected]. To unsubscribe click here: http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df5d5&n=T&l=tips&o=8962 or send a blank email to leave-8962-13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df...@fsulist.frostburg.edu
