Singular or Plural?

Here’s the passage. I’ll put the words I’m writing about in bold.

The results show that during 2014 to 2018, about half the amount of warm water travelling northwards towards the Arctic Ocean actually flows though the Rockall Trough.

Historical data from the region suggest that this is not always the case, with more water flowing through the Iceland Basin to the west in other years. 

NationalOceanographyCentre@public.govdelivery.com newsletter for September 25, 2020, referring to https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2020JC016403

(“Travelling” has two l’s because the National Oceanography Centre is in England.)

So should “data” be singular or plural? Technically, the word is a plural (the singular is “datum”). You mainly see the word used as a plural in scientific writing, I suppose because they like to be technically correct and they use Latin a lot. But “data” refers to a group of um, datums, and “group” is singular. So in informal writing, you can get away with using “data” as a singular.

But use “data” as a plural if you want to be really really correct.

Here’s a picture of the data-collecting instrument:

PS—I could have said “data points” or “results” instead of “datums.” “Datums” is funnier.

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At least not directly. The word is cattle. We don’t say “thirteen cattle.” We say “thirteen head of cattle.” This linguistic quirk occurred to me when I was reading We Have No Idea, by Jorge Cham and Daniel Whiteson, and they got their name for some livestock wrong. Here’s the guilty passage:

The Pierre Auger Observatory in South America is such a telescope. In 3,000 square kilometers of land, they have 1,600 particle detectors and more than 10,000 cows.

Don’t say “cows” either. It’s “head of cattle.”

Here’s a picture of the place:

The rule for agreement is that a singular subject gets a singular verb, and plural subject gets a plural verb—even when a differently numbered phrase intervenes. But exceptions exist!

Sometimes a plural can be treated as a singular. In the past I mentioned that some company names, that end in “& Co.” are treated as singulars.

Here’s a sentence (from a Facebook post, so I can’t link to it) in which the writer, Dr. Bill Stillwell, an MD, defines a plural as a singular:

Renal damage, up to 50% of ICU patients was also seen, possibly from the high concentrations of ACE2 receptors found in the kidneys (used by the virus to effect cell entry) and 5-10% of patients required dialysis.

What was seen? Not the patients (plural), but the damage (singular). (Myself, I’d have inserted “in” before “up.”)

Here’s another one, on page 75 of the March 2020 Scientific American. It’s a bit trickier:

Our concepts of how the two and a half pounds of flabby flesh between our ears accomplish learning date to Ivan Pavlov’s classic experiments, where he found that dogs could learn to salivate at the sound of a bell.

The writer is obviously referring to the brain, a single thing, even though he called it a number of pounds of flesh, a plural.

Was he right? “Pounds” is plural, but they don’t act separately (do they?). Feel free to comment in the comments.

Okay, they should make her look more glamorous, because she’s got good grammar technique! (Am I biased???) She’s suggesting they take out the plural to see how their sentence sounds.

The grammar rule is to use the objective case (me) after a preposition. We get this correct when the object is alone, but for some reason, people often don’t do this when they have a compound object.

Make her look more like my wife.

This is called the plural of majesty. Technically, only the king and queen may use this.

In German, royalty refer to each other with the formal “Sie,” and not the familiar “du.”