3 December 2001
I was reading a book the other day - The Free Bards by Mercedes Lackey, to be specific - and was finally past the exposition at the beginning of the second section where they re-capped everything in the first (it's a compilation of three novels originally released separately, so a certain amount of exposition is necessary)...
Wait. Too many parentheticals and side comments. I was reading the book, and one of the characters said, "Data. The word is the same, singular or plural."
I wanted to rip the book in half, right then and there.
The singular of data is datum.
It's not something that I expect every joe on the street to know. No one actually uses datum any more - but it's still grammatically incorrect to say "a data." The current usage for the singular of data is, "a piece of data."
I don't know why this infuriated me so much, but I don't know if I'm going to be able to finish reading the book now. I had already been annoyed with the astonishingly heavy-handed exposition.
Weird grammatical things bother me from time to time.
Just lately, I've heard the verb "to be" dropped a lot, as if it weren't necessary. As in, "The cat wants fed." Or, "The laundry needs moved."
It's always about all I can do to bite through my lip and avoid correcting these. Everyone hates being corrected. But since I'm not actually correcting anyone specific here, I'm going to take the opportunity to lecture you all: The cat wants to be fed. If you have a moral objection to the verb or are in such an astonishing hurry that two syllables is going to mean the difference between life and death, the laundry needs moving.
We all have our particular grammatical pushbuttons.
For Matt, it's the word "flammable". (It means the same thing as "inflammable." Look it up. "Flammable" was introduced into the language fairly recently because someone thought that the "in-" prefix - since it's sometimes a negator - would confuse people into thinking that "inflammable" meant "impervious to flame.")
For Kevin, it's a modification of the word "unique." (If something is unique, it's unique. It can't be "very unique" or "especially unique." If it's unique, there's only one, anywhere. If you have to modify it, then the word you want is rare. I keep forgetting to ask him if "truly unique" is acceptable.)
I don't claim to be perfect. I slip up frequently. Sometimes, I even slip up deliberately. But I hate it when people tell me that grammar doesn't matter, as long as I understand them.
Because I had a manager, a few projects back, whose grammar was so awful I frequently couldn't understand him. How someone with communication skills that poor managed to get to management, I don't know. It was embarrassing to know that he was the one representing our company to the customer. I winced every time he sent out an e-mail.
It's not that he's dumb - because he's actually one of the smartest people I know. It's not that he's a bad manager - because he's actually not bad at it. It's just that his diction and grammar - verbal and written, formal and informal - made him sound ignorant.
It matters. And while you're at it, sit up straight, eat your vegetables, and for heaven's sake, put on a sweater - your mother's cold.
Word of the Day:
hare - to go swiftly; to move or act with extreme haste
Song of the Day:
Blue Moon (the Marcels)
Currently Reading:
- whatever's closest