FBI grammar (was Re: FBI utilizing supermarket club cards in profiling)

Bill Stewart bill.stewart at pobox.com
Fri Oct 19 10:26:06 PDT 2001


At 01:00 PM 10/11/2001 +0100, Ken Brown wrote:
>"Dr. Evil" wrote:
> >
> > > There was a time when "data" was purely the plural form of latin "datum".
> > > Not anymore. The first example given by the online Merriam-Webster
> > > dictionary is, whattayaknow, "the data is plentiful and easily 
> available".
> >
> > Some of us will always know that "data" is plural
>
>In Latin maybe. But English has this nice thing with countable and
>non-countable forms of nouns. "That data" and "those  data" mean subtly
>different things. Like "Some bread" and "some breads".

More to the point, English grammar also has a thing about
evolution, flexibility, and development and acquisition of new words,
so the mere fact that "data" was a plural noun when we first stole it,
or alternatively a collective noun, doesn't mean that that's
what we did with it when we were done adopting it into common usage.

Besides, the FBI ought to be bashed for what they *said*,
not just the inarticulateness with which you believe they said it.

English and American languages do have a lot of fundamental structure,
including a variety of competing structures,
but they're fundamentally usage-based, not centrally-controlled like French.
(And at that, French central control of language was merely a successful 
chauvinist
imposition of Parisian culture and language on the rest of the country,
intended to stomp out resistance from Provencal, Breton, and other
regional languages and dialects, during the periods when various
kings and dictators and emperors were imposing their control on the
economics and politics of the region.  .)





More information about the cypherpunks-legacy mailing list