(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

[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.