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Comment by vulcan01 | Hacker News Reader

The Economist is a British publication, and generally tends to follow stricter grammatical rules than what I assume is your American English. "Datum" is singular and "data" is plural, so The Economist have used "are" instead of "is".

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While opinion is split on this, these days I don't think you can appeal to strictness alone to justify 'data' being plural, given the way usage has already gone. People (like me) who say 'data is...' are simply using data as a mass noun (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_noun), which seems to be a reasonable direction to be taking the language. I may be influenced by the fact that I usually see 'datum' used to refer to a reference point or marker in some arbitrary space, and thus in my mind is now another word separate from 'data' (albeit with shared etymology). If I had more than one datum, I'd call them 'datums', though I've yet to test how acceptable this would be in a formal setting.

They can both be fine, though. I say "data are" myself.

You are taking a prescriptive approach (which is fine), but it is just as reasonable to take the descriptive approach to linguistics and say "in modern American English 'data' is not countable, and it is used the way 'water' is used". It is self-consistent and (currently) grammatically correct to say "this data is important" like you would say "this water is wet". I guess this implies "datum" is archaic now. At least for the linguistic/cultural bubble in which I exist.

Even in British English usage as an abstract mass noun with singular verbs is acceptable (possibly even the norm[1]).

Usage as a plural noun is an Economist house style choice[2].

It's hard to tell how well the Economist sticks to that style choice. A Google site: search, with a date range of the last 10 years, shows no usage of "datum" (except for the article about the subject).

An Google site: search for usages of "data is" in the last 10 years returns plenty of results.

[1] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=GB&q=%... [2] https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2012/07/13/data-or-...

There is a lot of American English, but your assumption is wrong. It would be uncommon to say 'data are valuable' in England too.

If this was ever a debate, it was decided a long time ago. Grammarians may choose to argue the point (as if our language was defined in Ancient Rome) but saying "data are" sounds like simple-minded country bumpkins struggling to come to grips with it all.

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