More Pedantics: the Plural of "data"

Also ft. "media"

Another perennial note of grammar pedantry is the custom of religiously using the nouns “data” and “media” with plural verbs, since the nouns are plural—data means many “given” things (an individual datum), while media means more than one medium. Both have classical roots, basically being nouns imported from Latin into English, complete with their (typically neuter) plural suffix -a.

And I readily admit that I am scrupulous myself, speaking of what the media are up to and how the data show this or that. But I realized recently that a grammatical rule of Ancient Greek that learners must become acquainted with codifies this practice already rampant in colloquial English. Namely: neuter plural subject nouns take singular verbs (e.g. “is” rather than “are”) all the time.

Here it is in Romans 12:4-5, for example, rendered in the ESV as, “For as in one body we have many members, and the members do not all have the same function, so we, though many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another.” When Paul writes “the members do not have,” he’s using a singular verb (“has”) even though the subject is the neuter plural “all the members.” To make this even more closely aligned, English seems to pick up on this specifically with nouns with the ancient neuter ending -a. Maybe that’s because it’s not the familiar -s and so we’re not resistant to how unfamiliar it would sound? But regardless: neuter plural nouns frequently take singular verbs, in Greek, or in English. So far as I can tell, it’s debatable whether this happened in Latin.

All in all, it sort of makes sense for this rule to persist . . . but it’s also murky. It’s happening in English with Latin words (media, data) even though the rule is certifiably Greek. But to make matters more complicated, the typical Latin neuter plural ending -a is the same as the most common Greek one. (The Romans 12 example is an exception, where the ending is the vowel “eta” rather than the vowel alpha, but the gender is still neuter. Heck, the adjectives “the” and “all” employ the alpha plural; that term for “members” just declines differently.)