>>You keep up the good fight and God bless you. Did you know that certain language police way back in the old days hated the bastardization of God Bless Yee into goodbye?<<
Thanks and, wow! great factoid — sort of like how we “devolved” “God Speed You On Your Journey” into “Godspeed” (which, sadly, is all but gone).
“Data” shall be a plural noun for me and not a collective noun (IMHO people think it is the same as the collective noun “information”) until I take my dying breath.
I love the beauty of our language. I wish Godspeed was still used.
I was taught that data is singular when talking about a specific type of data, such as “the elevation data is ....” but “elevation, temperature and soil data are....”.
It seems to make sense, but never sounded right to me. But, in this case, ALL types of data are missing - so the “are” would seem to be correct.
But, I wonder if it is the same as money vs. “monies”. Where “monies”, from what I was told, refers to money from various sorts of sources. Such as “the monies for the research come from private, government and industry sources”.
What I would like to know is, where are the monies coming from that will be used so the EPA can measure the changes in CO2 data as they try to get it from 0.038% down to 0.025% (or whatever!).
G’day Mate! (Probably some bastardization of God Bless!? ;)