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

[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!