Data and Donations

The way we use words is not always 'rational':  that is, we don't always take time to think about grammar or the best way of expressing ourselves.  The words are just blurted out.  It can be the same when we write - which is one of the reasons that editors exist.

A good sample of word-blurting appeared when a BBC reporter was speaking earlier this month about one or other of the recent high-level scandals.  "They are blaming we in the media" he said.  I think we can explain the faulty grammar by the fact that 'we-in-the-media' is a sort of composite noun, most often used as the subject of a sentence; and when a speaker wants to use it as the object it is very easy to just lift it in one piece and insert it wholesale into a sentence as the subject.

It is is a bit like our use of  the Latin word data as a singular noun.  "We have been given this data" many speakers and writers will now say, when they mean 'these data' - for the Latin term is plural.  The singular 'datum' is very rarely found in English now, though the Ordnance Survey used it - and perhaps still do - to describe the basis of calculation of heights above sea level.  The 'datum', or 'given' fact is the average or 'mean' level of low tide at Liverpool. So, 'given' this level as the basis of calculation, the top of Ben Nevis was estimated to be 4406 feet high.  The plural term 'data' has apparently been used in English as a singular since the nineteenth century, when (so the Shorter Oxford Dictionary tells us) such use (or misuse) was 'rare'.  Today it is so common as almost to be the norm:  it has become a pseudo-scholarly alternative to 'information'.

Latin datum is the past participle of the verb do/dat-, meaning to give.  The ancient Romans also had a noun donum meaning a gift, and another verb dono/donat- meaning to 'bestow', from which we get our terms 'donate' and 'donation'.

Data and Donations