The Data Says …

« previous post | next post »

Today's SMBC:


Mouseover title: "If you can convince your spouse that Data is a fun offbeat middle name, and that Theodore is a beautiful first name, you might actually get away with this."

And a career as a corporate PR advisor awaits.

The aftercomic:



19 Comments

  1. Robot Therapist said,

    October 24, 2019 @ 11:36 am

    "The data says", often phrased as "It turns out that…"

  2. Ross Presser said,

    October 24, 2019 @ 12:00 pm

    Shouldn't it be "The data say"? Data is supposed to be plural of datum…

  3. martin schwartz said,

    October 24, 2019 @ 1:41 pm

    The media uses data as a singular regularly.
    I wonder how many people, apart from Mr. Presser and myself, still
    use "media" and "data" strictly as a plural. I used to have a crisis
    when ordering one of several biscotti or piroshki, but I've given up eating them.
    Martin Schwartz

  4. David Morris said,

    October 24, 2019 @ 2:55 pm

    Maybe his son's name is really Data, and he learned to speak English from Ivana Trump.

  5. Richard Hershberger said,

    October 24, 2019 @ 3:28 pm

    I would assume anyone with a kid named "Data" was a Trekkie. If Data's sister is "Galadriel" then we have a mixed marriage.

  6. Terry Hunt said,

    October 24, 2019 @ 3:50 pm

    "Mouseoover title"?

    I'd be OK with either "Mouse-over" or "Mouse-hover". "Mouse-hoover", however, would really suck.

    [(myl) You can blame that one on Apple's *&%^$ butterfly keyboard. At least this iteration just doubles almost every 'o' keystroke, as opposed to my previous MacBook, which (as of the middle of a trip to a conference) refused to respond at all to the letter 'e', forcing me to resort to some major hackery to accomplish everyday tasks. I've decided never to buy another Apple laptop ever again, even though they're supposedly planning to go back to a keyboard design that actually works for more than a few months…]

  7. Sean Fearnley said,

    October 24, 2019 @ 5:37 pm

    Surely 'The Data' as a shortening of 'Theodore Data' would be pronounced /θiː deɪtə/?

  8. JPL said,

    October 24, 2019 @ 6:53 pm

    The data never says things like that. It's not what's called "the data" that says things like that; it's sentences with prescriptive intent that, if they are valid, are dependent on a (modalized) causal law. "suggests" would be OK, I would say. Having said that, as they say, three milk shakes for lunch seems like a good idea to me.

  9. Jon said,

    October 25, 2019 @ 12:13 am

    Martin Schwartz:
    How about agenda? Is that plural for you?

  10. David J. Littleboy said,

    October 25, 2019 @ 9:03 am

    Re: data.

    We've been through this before: comp. sci. treats data as a mass noun, social (and some other) scientists treat it as a simple plural.

    It's simply a matter of different dialects. Fortunately, neither have armies…

  11. Bathrobe said,

    October 25, 2019 @ 10:18 am

    "they're supposedly planning to go back to a keyboard design that actually works for more than a few months" — but that won't be for a couple of years. I too have vowed to buy something different next time. This is not Johnny Ives' greatest legacy.

  12. Lior Silberman said,

    October 25, 2019 @ 10:23 am

    Jon: agenda is plural in the sense of "several items for discussion", but singular in its sense "the list of topics for discussion".

    Our Arabic schoolbooks had balad (بلد‎, "city") with plural bilad (بلاد, "cities"), and then bilad again with the singular meaning "country" in which case it has its own plural buldan (بلدان, "countries").

  13. Michael Watts said,

    October 25, 2019 @ 12:11 pm

    I wonder how many people, apart from Mr. Presser and myself, still use "media" and "data" strictly as a plural.

    Bold words to follow this sentence:

    The media uses data as a singular regularly.

  14. Michael Watts said,

    October 25, 2019 @ 12:13 pm

    Our Arabic schoolbooks had balad (بلد‎, "city") with plural bilad (بلاد, "cities"), and then bilad again with the singular meaning "country" in which case it has its own plural buldan (بلدان, "countries").

    Much like this sequence in English:

    person

    people (several persons)

    people (a population)

    peoples (several populations)

  15. Grover Jones said,

    October 25, 2019 @ 6:09 pm

    @David J. Littleboy

    Or should that be "neither HAS armies"? -:)

  16. Rodger C said,

    October 26, 2019 @ 10:45 am

    Or rather "neither has an army."

  17. rosie said,

    October 28, 2019 @ 2:30 am

    Oh no, not this phenomena again. You don't have to be a university alumni — anyone with more intelligence than a fungi or a cacti knows that, to determine an English noun's grammar, the grammar of the word it was derived from is not a valid criteria. Linguists can give statistics from a corpora to support their case. A kudo to them.

  18. Grover Jones said,

    October 28, 2019 @ 8:48 am

    @Rodger C

    Though plenty of entities have multiple armies:

    https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Field_Army_insignia_of_the_United_States_Army

  19. Eurobubba said,

    October 31, 2019 @ 10:43 am

    Sometimes when I'm not very hungry I just eat one spaghetto.

RSS feed for comments on this post