Reply to post: Re: "does this prevent people accessing it from the US? "

Re: "does this prevent people accessing it from the US? "

do yourself a favour and read it all

I did. I don't know who the author of that blog post is or whether he (is Norman the name?) is a world-renowned authority on linguistics, but I find many of the arguments there unconvincing. No downvotes for you, though - thanks for the link, even as I disagree with it.

It seems to me that the writer has his mind set on the non-scientific and non-technical use of the word data as generic "information" (mass singular noun - by the way, his usage of "massive singular" makes me doubt he is a linguistics expert). He is very far from thinking in terms of discrete measurements or data points - contexts where the notion of datum as singular and data as plural are common and standard. That's the only charitable explanation of "there's no such thing as 'datum'" and other unsupported statements that I can offer.

Maybe I am biased by my Ph.D. thesis on intergalactic medium, but to me that mass singular noun is further from the contemporary use of the corresponding plural in expressions like "mass media" or 'mainstream media" or "print media" than "datum" (that naturally corresponds to a data point, a result of measurement or observation) is from "data". It is natural to me to say or write "data were collected" in an academic paper or a technical report, but I won't be put off by a mainstream media article where a journalist will write "a lot of data was collected" - for the journalist this is equivalent to "a lot of information became available", only a bit more scientific-looking. The journalist or his readership won't care about individual recorded measurements, but the audience of a technical publication or document will. Members of the Commentariat often do, I suspect.

Major dictionaries (that should be regarded as sources of expert opinion on language), including Oxford, Cambridge, and Merriam-Webster, disagree with the blogger on all major counts. They all have entries for datum, they all list data as plural for datum, and they all say that both plural and mass singular usage of data are common and standard.

The Oxford's Lexico page (see link above) makes the same distinction between scientific and non-scientific use of data and I did above, while Merriam-Webster (again, see the link above) makes another relevant point:

"The plural construction is more common in print, evidently because the house style of several publishers mandates it."