Is Datum Dead?

I got quite a few well-intentioned comments on my "profligate" and sometimes “incorrect” use of data in my two previous entries.  Some of my colleagues in the academic realm are dismayed by my use of the word a few times as singular instead of plural; e.g. “data is”  instead of  “data are” or “datum is.” A few of my colleagues outside of academe (i.e. practitioners, program sponsors, implementing partners, innovators and entrepreneurs) were equally quick to point out that the phrase the data dictate (v) should have been the data dictates. Obviously, to them data is singular.

Quite a large number of you correctly noted that I was invoking poetic license with the word, pointing out my punctuation of God versus god and Data versus data--e.g. Zeus is god but Data is God, to show that my deified anthropomorphic Data is way more powerful than Zeus.

I know of course that data, like media, is plural, their singular forms being datum and medium respectively. But who says Datum is God? Not a god that evokes awe and respect and total obeisance. Clearly this is an ongoing debate about the role and status of language in society. Dictionary and thesaurus companies owe their raison d’être to the interminably vexing question “when does a word become officially accepted and acceptable [to use]?” But what is unarguable is that it is we as a society who collectively decide, over an extended period of time, when words die and get buried in an etymological graveyard, when others go into comma and get rarely used, and when others morph semantically to gain new life.

To me, datum is in a coma one twitch-of-a-smile short of vegetative. Like medium as singular for [mass/social] media, I use it only to correct students, when in the company of my academic peers or when writing with either as my exclusive target audience.

This brings me to the question for you. Is datum dead? I am literally dying to know. Ha! Literally. Topic for another discussion.

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