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!