What do erotica, stamina, and candelabra have in common? Oh, stop it. The answer is that they are all singular nouns that started off plural. In Latin, nouns that end in –um when alone often end in –a in groups. But as longtime New York Times copy editor Merrill Perlman observed in 2009, standard English is—and has been, for centuries—undergoing an inexorable de-Latinization. Words borrowed from the Roman tongue, second-declension neuter nouns like stadium and agendum, are either acquiring fresh plural forms (stadiums, not stadia) or entering a funhouse afterlife in which new plural markers are layered over old ones, rendering the previous plurals singular (see: agendas). This might be inevitable as the number of English speakers familiar with Latin endings dwindles, and we intuitively apply our proud Anglo-Saxon laws to the verbal relics Caesar’s empire left behind. Ecce, when it comes to the conventions holding up a language like so many Doric columns, all are—excuse me, all is—ephemera.
But sagely pointing out that language evolves is a little like showing up to a funeral and interrupting the eulogist to proclaim that “everyone dies, hello.” It’s OK to be sad about the loss of your favorite plural nouns. And for a lot of journalists, that means mourning a sea change in the usage of two words very dear to our hearts: data and media.
Oh, is it just me? Am I wrongfully pluralizing a singular experience of the English language? Well, maybe people shouldn’t have made a bunch of plural nouns singular and thus necessitated some sort of karmic payback.
Once the plural forms of datum and medium, data and media have transformed into mass nouns: singular terms, like furniture or work or luck, that describe undifferentiated and at times uncountable units. This isn’t new for either word: Both have moonlit as mass nouns for about as long as they’ve belonged to the English language. But the frequencies seem to have altered, with singular data’s and media’s picking up relative to plural ones over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries.
This shift may have been accelerated by the rise of social media and Big Data, two terms that are more often treated as Goliaths than as decentralized bundles. Social media, in the sense of “that corner of the internet devoted to networking,” got started around 2004, whereas Big Data will celebrate its 40th birthday four years from now, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.
The OED finds a singular data in a 1702 astronomy treatise, 50 or so years after the first recorded plural data appeared in a lesson on trigonometry. (Draw what conclusions you will about stargazers versus triangle measurers.) Meanwhile, media in the sense of “the means of mass communication” arose in the 1920s. Frequently taking the singular (all of the OED’s citations pair it with a singular verb), its decidedly un-Virgilian number roused scolds who lamented the falling away from classical Latin. The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage, citing the Gray Lady’s “grammatically exacting readership,” classifies the term as plural. Slate follows the Associated Press stylebook, which dictates that media “generally takes a plural verb,” and data “normally” does. (That said, the phrase “media is” appears almost twice as frequently as “media are” on our website, again thanks largely to “social media.”)
Here’s how the linguists at the Grammarphobia blog adjudicate the issue:
We say (and modern dictionaries agree) that “media” is singular when it refers to the world of mass communications as a whole, but plural when it refers to the people in this world or the different types of communications.
For instance, they continue, you might mourn that “the media is obsessed with celebrity trials.” Also fine (but increasingly rare): “The media are packed into the courtroom like sardines” and “The media at the trial include radio, TV, and the blogosphere.”
What do we lose when a formerly plural noun turns singular? Perlman cites lexicographer Roy Blount Jr., who argues that “to treat all these media [television, newspapers, blogs] as a monolithic institution is to create a bugaboo or punching bag.” We forget how, if media evokes mediation, different forms of communication in fact mediate stories in different ways. Same goes for data, which is not always consistent. In the aggregate, it can convey more certainty and authority than it perhaps deserves. Might the same logic have driven the AP’s recent decision to prescribe a lowercase “i” for “internet”? Maybe the stylebook feared that the straightjacket of an authoritarian I would erase the web’s internal dissonance and variety.
It’s easier to dismiss or lionize the singular media, the unified and self-sufficient data. Recuperating these nouns to describe heterogeneous sets adds nuance to our conversations and remains truer to life. Of course, there’s probably no stopping de-Latinization—just ask the once-plural insignia, trivia, and opera. But maybe we can place some kind of conservation effort for these distinguished old plurals on the agenda.
