My sister recently informed me that I have too many hills on which I intend to die

[conuly]

She's quite right, of course, and one day I'll write out a short and not at all comprehensive list of them for your amusement.

Today, though, I'll restrict myself to two, and I'll explain why when I'm done.

1. Data is a mass noun and not a count noun.

2. The "less or fewer" distinction is not a rule of traditional grammar, and whoever told you that lied to you. It's a made up zombie rule (technical term!) literally invented by some dude in the 1700s and ignored by careful, educated writers and speakers ever since.

If you're wondering why I picked those two, here's why:

If you combine them, you run the risk of referring to something or other having fewer data, and that's just... that's just wrong. It's just wrong. I'm sorry, I can't be descriptivist about this, I think it was in The New Yorker or something and it's wrong. It's all wrong.

You can't say "fewer data" and shame on you if you do it anyway.

Comments

[sixbeforelunch]

I am prepared to join you on both of these hills, most especially the first. I find “the data are” and “these data” jarring every time I hear it.

[conuly]

Seriously.

[hudebnik]

To be honest, I find "the data is" jarring every time I hear it, but I hear it so often that my twitch response has become barely visible. Not a hill worth dying on; that battle is lost.

Likewise "a friend told me that they..." I'm all in favor of gender-neutral pronouns for situations in which gender is unknown or irrelevant, but my software-engineer mind says "we have a perfectly good gender-neutral singular pronoun that everyone already knows, so why not use it wherever we need a gender-neutral singular pronoun? That would be the elegant, efficient, 'right' answer; no need to invent new words or blur the grammatically-useful distinction of number." That battle too is lost.

I was honestly confused, ten years ago or so, when I first heard "they" used to refer to a single, specific, feminine-looking, feminine-dressed, feminine-named person in the same room a few feet away; I assumed it meant that person and her roommate. But it's 2023 now: "they" is as often singular as plural, and old fogeys like me just have to live with it.

(My preferred pronouns are "I/me/my". I think of myself as male, but that matters mostly when I go to the bathroom or have sex, while being first-person matters when I do anything. If you're talking to me, please use "you/your". If you're talking about me in my absence, that's between you and the person you're talking to; I'm not there so I don't care. Grump, grump. You kids, get off my lawn.)

[sixbeforelunch]

we have a perfectly good gender-neutral singular pronoun that everyone already knows, so why not use it wherever we need a gender-neutral singular pronoun?

Are you referring to 'it'? I'm torn on that one. On the one hand, I've read a lot of sci-fi where 'it' is used to refer to sapient non-gendered beings and it quickly fades into the background for me in a way that 'they' never manages to. OTOH, even in sci-fi 'it' almost always refers to a non-human and the word has such a long history of being used to de-humanize people. I can see why most people who want to use non-gendered pronouns would not want to open themselves up to being called 'it'.

If 'it' is un-reclaimable, my preference is for English to ditch gendered pronouns altogether and for 'ey/em/eir' to take over as a universal non-gendered pronoun. It's just they with the 'th' lopped off, so the declension is easy enough. In speech 'they' and 'ey' are so similar that there might be some confusion, but I find I don't get confused by the singular 'they' in speech, only text. (Plus, in a conversation, you can generally clarify with the person you're speaking to.) 'Ey' and 'they' are clearly different in text, and I suspect that if someone wrote a book which ditched all gendered pronouns and used only 'ey' for singular and 'they' for plural, I'd get used to it pretty quickly and soon stop noticing. (I genuinely stopped noticing 'per/pers/perself' when I read Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time and that one's a good deal more jarring on first glance.)

blur the grammatically-useful distinction of number.

The widespread acceptance of the singular 'they' and loss of the numerical distinction reminds me a little of when English dropped 'thou'. It was a good thing, in that we no longer have to worry about rank and debate if we're close enough to someone to refer to them as 'thou' but at the same time, we lost a useful distinction between a singular second person and a plural second person. It would have been nice if we could have lost the rank/closeness signifier and just accepted 'thou' as always singular and 'you' as always plural and then we wouldn't be stuck with occasional kludgy phrases like 'you guys' and 'you all', but that's not how English evolved and it still works, so. But, as you say, at a certain point you're shoveling against the tide and just have to accept that the language is what it is.

[hudebnik]

Exactly. People associate "it" with "non-human". Why? Because individual humans are always referred to by gendered pronouns. (For some reason English doesn't have gendered plural pronouns.) Why? Because when the English language developed, it was taken for granted that every human is either male or female, not both, not neither, not "why does it matter?" Once you drop that assumption, there's no longer any reason to always refer to people by gendered pronouns, and therefore no reason to associate "it" with "non-human", and therefore no reason not to use "it" for individual humans whose gender is unknown, irrelevant, ambiguous, or non-existent.

But that's logic speaking, and this isn't about logic. Even people passionately committed to using gender-neutral pronouns have an apparently unbreakable emotional association of "it" with "non-human", and don't want to adopt "it" for themselves or their friends for fear that it demeans them.

Of course, if we used a gender-neutral pronoun whenever the person's gender was irrelevant to the discussion, we'd quickly discover that that covers about 99% of the time, and gendered pronouns would fade from use altogether, and would appear in the dictionary with an "archaic" annotation. Which would be fine with me.

[peristaltor]

Eh, I think it would be harder for me to refer to a human as an "it" that it would to get the wrong pronoun, plural or not. Some habits were beaten into us as youngsters.

At one point, calling someone an "it" was a grievous insult.

[hudebnik]

Yes, when I was a child, calling someone "it" was an insult. So was calling a boy "she" or (I presume) calling a girl "he", because schoolchildren are so good at finding ways to insult one another.

Calling a singular person "they" was never an insult, it merely demonstrated the speaker's stupidity or lack of education. Which is why I still have a hard time doing it even when intelligent, well-educated people around me are doing so.

[peristaltor]

Calling a singular person "they" was never an insult, it merely demonstrated the speaker's stupidity or lack of education.

Exactly!

[maju]

Fewer data just sounds ridiculous.

[conuly]

Right!?

[l33tminion]

Yeah, it's not "one datum", "two data", you use an ancillary count noun like "pieces" or "items". And it's definitely "less data", not "fewer data".

"Fewer" being limited to countable things seems sound? "Less" being limited to non-countable things, on the other hand, is on real shaky ground descriptively. I wouldn't be surprised if one day "fewer" falls out of use enough that it's marked as archaic.

[conuly]

"Fewer" being limited to countable things seems sound? "Less" being limited to non-countable things, on the other hand, is on real shaky ground descriptively.

Yes, sorry, that is very much what I meant.

[peristaltor]

Yeah. Data has that… qualitative quality, based not on it's measurable piles but on its usefulness.

[hamsterwoman]

"Fewer data" just sounds wrong! Fewer data POINTS, sure, there's your countable noun alternative if you want it, but data is definitely a mass noun. It's like rice and grains of rice! (I know it is actually the plural of datum, but that doesn't matter and also nobody uses "datum" that way.)

[fred_mouse]

^this!

Although, I once had an older data data scientist who had learnt Latin at school argue something about how the general assumptions about data/datum are Wrong!, but I have no memory of what the correct detail was, just the conclusion that I could go on the way I was and be comfortable knowing that even those who knew Latin disagreed with each other

[hamsterwoman]

and be comfortable knowing that even those who knew Latin disagreed with each other

Hehe, I like having that additional datum data point :D

[topaz_eyes]

Eh, I'll stay on the "less or fewer" hill, because "less" is a mass adjective, and "fewer" is a count adjective. Sand is a mass noun, so we say less sand. We don't say "fewer sand," that's just wrong. But if we're referring to grains of sand, we say fewer, because it refers to grains and we can count the grains. But that's just me.

It's like less data, and fewer data points.

[conuly]

Fewer has always been acceptable with count nouns and not mass nouns.

Less has always been acceptable with both count nouns and mass nouns.

But that's just me.

You and Robert Baker, 1770. And if Robert Baker, whom you've never heard of because as near as I can tell he never did anything worth talking about other than issue one single random grammar peevery decree*, had simply kept his mouth shut about his personal preferences we wouldn't be having this conversation at all.

* In fairness to him, his justification was always simply "I personally think it sounds better that way", and it's everybody else who got ridiculous over it.

[ahazelshadeofwinter]

I'm OK with using "fewer" with count nouns; the thing that will never stop driving me up a tree is when it's hypercorrected to be used with *mass* nouns. I've never seen "fewer data," but there are writers who seem convinced that "fewer" should be used with any phrase that has a number in it, even if that number is measuring a continuous quantity and not counting discrete items at all. "Fewer than five miles away"--augh!! "Fewer than fifty percent of the respondents polled"--no, you're not counting the respondents, you're measuring the proportion of them as compared to the total. I'm willing to give up "fewer" entirely if it will make this stop.

[frandroid]

When you have enough hills, you get upgraded to intending to die on a hill chain.

[conuly]

I'm planning to just, like, sprint from one to the next.

[cactuswatcher]

Call it a weird dialect of English. If people want to play sophomoric pseudo Latin games, and use "data" as a plural of "datum," we can't really stop them. They aren't going to listen to us. As far as I can tell the words "data" and "datum" aren't that closely related in general English usage. Personally I don't think there is such a thing as a datum (in the meaning of a unique indivisible piece of data) and therefore always use piece of or item of data.

[conuly]

If people want to play sophomoric pseudo Latin games, and use "data" as a plural of "datum," we can't really stop them.

Have you considered purchasing an air horn?

(Okay, okay, for this I'm being facetious..)

[agoodwinsmith]

AaaaahhhhhOOOooooogah!

[calimac]

If "fewer data" sounds wrong, "fewer pieces of data" sounds OK to me.

[conuly]

I guess, but who's actually gonna say that?

[sabotabby]

*galaxy brain moment*

[james]

I intend to die on the following hills:

You don't pluralise a word by adding apostrophe s.
Dialogue and action plus the beginning of a new paragraph - when to do it and when to not do it.
A drabble is 100 words.
No, Mulder/Skully is NOT SLASH. Slash does not mean "not canon".

[conuly]

Skully?

[james]

I never watched the show, I'm allowed to misspelled her name. ;-) But I rage at the clouds anyhow!

[crystalpyramid]

I am not entirely convinced that "fewer" is a real word at all. It seems like it might be a hoax.

[conuly]

Hah, and if so, I know the exact name of the person responsible.

[antisoppist]

For some of my work I have to follow the EU's style guide and I notice they have given up and say "Data can be used as a plural or a singular noun".

I imagine heated battles between people of different nations all taught slightly different English at school, plus native English speakers and someone eventually going "Fine! You can all be right!"

[andrewducker]

*loud cheering*

[peristaltor]

The latest Hill I intend to defend is "irony:" It cannot be intentional.

If it is intentional, it is "sarcasm." True Irony must be unintentional, based on an incorrect assumption. I know, common usage has moved on… but in the wrong direction.

There. I said it. I hope that defuses hipsters everywhere.