Is Data or Aren't They?

I haven't posted in a while on account of my midterms (which continue through next week) among other things, so I thought I'd take this opportunity to briefly comment on something which consistently irks me, namely, the mistaken notion that the collective noun "data" is grammatically plural. This is a widely spread notion and provides for that ugly but nonetheless far too common collocation "the data are," as, for example, on this page from the Wake Forest University Department of Biology. The roots of this misconception lie in the Latin analogue of our English word, which is a neuter plural past participle of the word for "give." In Latin, "data" are "givens," and thus, until actually quite recently, "data" was employed as a plural and meant "axioms." The OED cites the earliest usage of this sense from 1646. This, however, as any speaker of English will tell you, is not the most common meaning of the word "data."

The common modern meaning, which the OED sets as "Facts, esp. numerical facts, collected together for reference or information," shows up first in 1899. As it first came into usage, it may indeed have remained a plural in this sense; after all, people still learned Latin in those days. But after a century in the service of illiberally educated scientists, I can say with absolute certainty that in genuine usage the word is grammatically singular and plural only under the duress of pretension. I find no authority in the argument that the Latin word is plural: Latinitas non Anglice dicit, "Good Latin doesn't speak English." We have borrowed, for example, the Spanish word "siesta," which is grammatically feminine in Spanish, into our language. Should we then be saying "I approve of the siesta, it is a fine institution," or "I approve of the siesta, she is a fine institution." Obviously the latter is a little awkward, since only the biologically female are grammatically feminine in contemporary English.

Let us assume, however, that number is a different case from gender, since gender really only affects the personal pronouns, and take no note of the fact that number only affects present indicative verbs, and the preterite of "be." If we apply this steadfast principle of faithful Latinity to the whole language the results really become quite strange. Compare, for example, the verbs "translate" and "transfer." In Latin they are derived from different 'principle parts,' as they are called, of the same verb, the former being the perfect participle and the latter the present stem; the third 'principle part,' the perfect finite verb, transtuli, has not found its way into English. But if it had, what sentences we could make! "After that, Mr. Jones transtuled the works of Horace into English, having translated Ovid already. 'It is a goal of mine,' he said, 'to transfer all the great Latin poets into English.'"

The answer to this more absurd proposition, of course, is that different senses of a single Latin verb came into English by way of different stems. Now that they have become English, it is beyond silly to try to re-Latinize them. I fail to see how the case of "data" is much different. The sense of the word is undoubtedly plural, but in a collective way, which is hardly rare in English: navy, furniture, etc. The fact that the easiest synonym for "data" is "information" goes a long way, I think, towards showing the common sense of implementing it as a grammatical singular. English has simply used the word differently than Latin.

I will pass over the fact that neuter plurals always take singular verbs in Greek.

Words That Mean Only Themselves: Docile

It is my experience that the word ‘docile’ is one belonging primarily to animals. Its most common usage is the phrase ‘a docile creature,’ and when I, at least, use the word of people instead of animals, it operates by analogy of this sense, not independently, and applies animal characteristics to a human being. To me the word ‘docile’ suggests tameness and moreover a gentleness bordering almost on indifference. It is not so moral as 'lazy' nor so cold as 'inactive:' it is an animal word. That this meaning I have inherited is at odds with etymology does not surprise me; that I found it absent from every dictionary I have consulted does.

‘Docile’ is a direct borrowing of the Latin docilis, which means, quite literally, ‘teachable;’ it is an adjective formed from the verb docere, 'teach,' the same Latin root which gives us doctor, doctrine, and docent, among other words. If you look up ‘docile’ in an English dictionary, you will not find a definition far removed from this origin: the standard definition, which I have found in roughly the same form in several sources, contains two meanings, first, "willing to be taught or teachable," and second, "yielding to instruction, obedient, or tractable." I was surprised to encounter the first meaning, with which I am not at all familiar, because it was so exactly close to the Latin; the second gave me pause for being so slightly derived, and for maintaining a similar distance from what I would have made the current meaning. And in neither did I find even the slightest "esp. of animals" to vindicate me.

Yet it is not hard to see the shift from the Latin meaning of ‘docile’ to the one that is now colloquial. An animal which could be described as docile would probably also be described as tame or gentle, and if one were exposed only to phrases combining 'docile' with such words, it would make sense to take it for their synonym—and how else is meaning diluted but through the ingrained formulas of this process?—. Were I pressed, I would guess it began as something of a technical veterinarian or taxonomist’s term, perhaps even in its Latin original, and gained only later a new generality out of that specific use. What I find the last irony is that a word which had so humane a meaning, a word about learning and education, has become a word passing almost for an inborn quality in beasts. I leave you, then, with this dictum of Quintilian, from the second book of his Institutio Oratoria (“Oratorical Education”), a memory of the old docile: Nam ut illorum officium est docere, sic horum praebere se dociles, “For as it is the duty of instructors to teach, so it is the duty of students to prove themselves easily taught.”

Words That Mean Only Themselves: Asbestos

This is the first installment in what I hope shall become an intermittent series for this blog. The title refers to that class of words which both have a very tightly circumscribed meaning, and have been brought into English from other languages. Such words do not present the English speaker with their component parts, but rather arrive as a single unit, and therefore, to the uneducated take on a sort of mystical status in their meanings.

Take for example, the words ‘stance’ and ‘standing;’ both are formed in the same way from the verbs (identical in basic meaning) stare and stand, respectively. However, since ‘stance’ is a word adapted to English use from Latin (through Italian and French), the presence of this link in meaning to the whole system of ‘stand’ words is not as obvious as it is in ‘standing,’ which is an English word. ‘Stance’ and words like it are as slippery as they are untethered: we cannot grasp them because their meanings are so inflexible and fixed and we cannot identify their place within the bounds of our language because they did not spring out of it; they have only specific and complex meanings, and not simple or intuitive ones, because they are not native to English, and therefore must always exist, to some degree, as jargon. For these reasons I have identified them in the title of this post as meaning only themselves. I hope I will not be alone in finding it a fascinating and edifying task to uncover the etymology of such words.

I encountered today’s word, asbestos, in reading the Gospel of Matthew, 3:12, where the chaff will be burnt πυρι ασβεστω, with unquenchable fire. The Greek ασβεστος is formed from the root of the verb σβεννυμι, quench, and the Greek equivalent of un-, what grammarians call the Alpha Privative, or “The A That Takes Away,” which English speakers will be familiar with from words like 'atypical.' It therefore means, quite simply, unquenchable (Liddell and Scott says “of fire and laughter etc”). The modern meaning that you’ll find in the dictionary is derived from its application to certain minerals. Yet because of popular knowledge of the dangerous effects of those minerals, asbestos has come, in colloquial language, to be almost exclusively associated with poisoning, a turn which seems unfortunate for what was once such a fine poetic word in its original tongue: my Greek lexicon cites a beautiful phrase of Aeschylus, ασβεστος πορος οκεανου, “Ocean’s inextinguishable passage.”