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The Wall Street Journal is the latest to succumb to the forces of goodness and light:

Most style guides and dictionaries have come to accept the use of the noun data with either singular or plural verbs, and we hereby join the majority.

As usage has evolved from the word’s origin as the Latin plural of datum, singular verbs now are often used to refer to collections of information: Little data is available to support the conclusions.

Otherwise, generally continue to use the plural: Data are still being collected.

(As a singular/plural test, try to substitute statistics for data: It doesn’t work in the first case — little statistics is available — so the singular is fails to pass muster. The substitution does work in the second case — statistics are still being collected – so the plural are passes muster.)

Well, they’ve halfway succumbed, anyway. But I won’t rest until they — and everyone else — accept the plain fact that data should be treated as a singular noun in all circumstances. The worst offenders here are generally in academia, and I’ve always wondered if they actually talk the same way they write. (I mean in casual speech, not prepared remarks.) I’m not sure I’ve ever heard anyone say “data are,” but lots of diehards with PhDs still use it in print.

Now, I know that lots of people continue to foolishly disagree with me about this, but I’m curious how far they’re willing to push things. If you had, say, five bits of information, would you say I only have five data? If you really, truly believe that data is a plural noun, you’d have no problem with this. But does anyone actually do it? Discuss in comments.

Need more data, first? The chart below is from the Google Ngram viewer and displays the frequency of data is vs. data are in books. I wouldn’t pay too much attention to the peak around 1980, which might just be an artifact of what Google happens to have in its memory banks,1 but the relative popularity of the two phrases is pretty clear. In 1940, data are was a 4:1 runaway winner. By 1980, its lead was about 2½:1. Today it’s barely in the lead at all. It clearly sounds as pretentious to lots of other ears as it does to mine.

1On the other hand, it might be real. If it is, I attribute it to large numbers of people giving up and deciding they don’t need grief from either faction in this war. As a result, more and more people are simply recasting their sentences to avoid having to use the phrase at all.

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We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

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