Off topic: Latin plurals

[Patricia M Godfrey pmgodfrey@xxxxxxxx]

Well, we do say "genera" in taxonomy: "This family has only 2 genera but
25 species." But "de minimus" is just plain pretentious ignorance. The
IRS--why am I not surprised?--actually printed that in its tax
instructions one year, an accountant repeated it, and the article got
printed in the newsletter of the Editorial Freelancers Association, a
professional organization of copy editors and proofreaders, along with
other editorial types. I (who was secretary of the EFA at the time, and
write a regular column on matters grammatical) blew my stack, and wrote a
diatribe about people who "deck their dull chat" (Sheridan, of Mrs.
Malaprop) with foreign words and get them wrong.
	"Data," however, may be a different matter. Yes, it is plural in form.
But plurals can become singulars if their meaning changes. The classic
case is "agenda": literally it means "things to be done," but once it
acquired the meaning "a list of things to be done," it made sense to make
it a singular. And "data" is now often used with the meaning "dataset,"
or "body of data." Note that we say "much data" and "little data," not
"many" and "few." So I think it's moving toward singularity, and will
probably be considered a collective in a few more years.
Patricia