(no subject)

[conuly]

"HI-SEAS protocol prohibits a crew smaller than four, which produces fewer data for the researchers."

That sort of ugly clause is what you get when you combine two dubious made-up zombie rules*, in this case "data is a plural!" with "use fewer for count nouns!"

The rest of the article, barring that amazing butchering of normal speech, is pretty good and worth reading, though: When a Mars Simulation Goes Wrong

* That's a technical term.

Comments

[konsectatrix]

Nice catch.

This is a language of exceptions. All grammer rules should be sble to be overriden by the "does it sound awkward, ugly, or like such an incoherent mess that there's a chance it will summon an Elder God when read out loud?" clause.

[conuly]

They're not even rules. The less than/fewer than shibboleth was literally invented by some dude named Robert Baker in 1770 and has never been followed by anybody of note, before or sense.

It's not an exception. There's speaking naturally, and there's artificially molding your speech after some dead guy's personal preference that, for whatever reason, the half-educated and self-proclaimed style mavens of the world think is now "correct".

[konsectatrix]

Yeah, but I feel that way about almost all rules of this nature. I still call them rules, even if they're arbitrary, stupid, and I don't always care to follow them (It does annoy me that I have to waste so much brain keeping track of other monkey's bullshit just to get the reactions I want in a complex society, but here we are).

People make up rules, and then, when they don't work, come up with a million exceptions and excuses why they personally didn't have to follow the thing they made up.

[conuly]

That's why I just use the technical term: Made up zombie rule. They are made up zombie rules, nobody follows them or ever has followed them (except in that article up there), therefore nobody should promulgate them.

[jessie_c]

I had to read that quite a few times to see what was "wrong" with that sentence. Then I had to disconnect my knowledge of science and remember that to the general public, "data" is singular, and "datum" an unknown.

The rules in consideration are only zombies to those who do not want precision in their speech.

[conuly]

Nobody - and I mean nobody - is confused by natural phrasing. The silly less than/fewer than shibboleth was literally invented by some dude named Robert Baker in 1770 on the grounds that he liked it more. That's it there. That's his silly reasoning. He liked it more.

[jessie_c]

If we're dividing rabbits, then all grammatical rules are equally made up. We arrive at a consensus for either keeping or rejecting our made-up rules using a very simple decision criterion: Does it work? Is the language made more useful by following the rule? Then it gets kept.

[conuly]

If we're dividing rabbits, then all grammatical rules are equally made up.

This is not true. All grammatical rules evolved. Only the zombie rules are made up.

(You can tell the difference because nobody tells you, for example, that in English we can only say "the big white horse" and never "the white big horse" or that when we add "fucking" to a word we always add it before the stressed syllable - absofuckinglutely! - and never anywhere else - abfuckingsolutely? The right way intuitively sounds right, in the same way that the right way to fold your hands feels right and the wrong way doesn't.)

Is the language made more useful by following the rule?

No, it's not. Nobody has ever misunderstood somebody else because they used less where Robert Baker thought "fewer" sounded more elegant. Neither has anybody ever been vastly baffled by the use of data as a mass noun, like "water" or "rice".

[jessie_c]

I recommend to you The Stories of English wherein much is made of the relative merits of prescriptivism Vs. descriptivism.

I actually have very little to say about the relative merits of 'fewer' as opposed to 'less'. Each works well, when given a properly constructed sentence to inhabit. Neither leads to misunderstanding, which is why 'fewer' survives in the language to this day, regardless its origin. This is what I meant when I asked 'does it work?'

[pauamma]

I think I lean toward "data" being a mass noun, not a count one. But I could be convinced of the opposite, I think.

[archangelbeth]

Less data. Fewer datums. ^______^

Unless you're talking transporter accidents, where you want fewer Datas. O;>

[conuly]

Excuse me, I want more Datas. After all, he's fully functional, so, um, the lore the merrier?

[archangelbeth]

*cackle*

Well, you certainly don't want so many as to cause space in the ship to be at a premium, for then you have no privacy to... assimilate the data. O;D

[flexagon]

Came here to say this. I see "data" as a collective noun, like "flour". "Data points" is plural and "datum" is singular.

[l33tminion]

"Data" is a plural construction, but that doesn't mean it's a countable noun. "Fewer data points" or "fewer pieces of data" is totally comprehensible, as is "less data". "Two data" doesn't read naturally at all.

(Is it even a plural noun for the sake of subject/verb agreement? "The data implies" reads pretty well, certainly far better than "fewer data".)

"Fewer" isn't dubious in that it has a long history of usage. But it's probably doomed in that "less" is more common and similar enough. So in the future, proper grammar will likely be, "I used one less cup of flour than specified in the recipe", and "fewer" will be in the dictionary as "less for countable nouns (archaic)".

[conuly]

It's a mass noun. Mass nouns, like "water" and "corn" and "mud" take a singular verb. You can refer to "waters" and the like, but that's unusual and often can be glossed as either poetic usage or talking about different types or units of whatever-it-is.

[l33tminion]

Yeah, that makes sense. Though "the data imply" might not read so terribly either, depending on the context. The continuing use of "datum" makes "data" a bit of an odd duck grammatically. It's clearly "a plural" in some contexts.

But "data is a plural" and "use fewer for count nouns" don't get you to "fewer data" unless you assume that all plural nouns are countable. It seems there's at least one exception.

[conuly]

I think we typically have to assume that plural forms are count nouns. I can't think of any mass noun that takes a plural except data - and honestly, not many people really do use plural forms with data.

[l33tminion]

Only takes one exception to make a generalization fail to hold in that case.

No argument that "data"/"datum" isn't grammatically really strange in English. IMO, "datum" is less obviously doomed than "fewer" in large part because it's more obscure.

[conuly]

The more obscure it is, the more likely it'll fade away - especially since we have a synonym for datum in the phrases "data point" or even "piece of data". An obscure alternative to a common phrase? I mean....

[l33tminion]

"Data point" and "piece of data" are way more common usage than "datum". But I still think "datum" will be later to get that "archaic" designation than "fewer" for two reasons. One is the obvious etymological connection to "data". The other is that it's jargon. You might say "less" instead of "fewer" to avoid sounding like a nerd, but saying "data point" instead "datum" doesn't help that much.