14May / 2018

Data is, sometimes

Financial Times recently updated their style guide:

data — the rule for always using data as plural has been relaxed. If you read data as singular then write it as such. For example, we already allow singular for ‘big data’. And we should for personal data too. An easy rule would be that if it can be used as a synonym for information then it should probably be singular — and if we are using it as economic data and mean figures, then we should stick to plural.

And for kicks, I dug up my New York Times style guide from 1999:

data is acceptable as a singular term for information: The data was persuasive. In its traditional sense, meaning a collection of facts and figures, the noun can still be plural: They tabulate the data, which arrive from bookstores nationwide. (In this sense, the singular is datum, a word both stilted and deservedly obscure.)

Data are sounds weird to me most of the time. When I say it like that, I feel like I should also drink a cup of tea with my pinky sticking out and a monocle firmly planted for distinction.

Tags: plural, singular, words

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10Nov / 2017

The words used by men and women to write about love

Josh Katz, Claire Cain Miller, and Kathleen A. Flynn for The Upshot plotted words used in essays above love submitted to The New York Times, focusing on a comparison between men and women’s word usage.

When writing about love, men are more likely to write about sex, and women about marriage. Women write more about feelings, men about actions.

Even as gender roles have merged and same-sex romance has become more accepted, men and women still speak different languages when they talk about love — at least, if Modern Love essays submitted to The New York Times are any indication.

Tags: love, Upshot, words

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29Apr / 2016

Mapping words to parts of the brain

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, researchers monitored brain activity in seven people while the subjects listened to two hours of stories from the Moth Radio Hour. The researchers then used that data to map words to parts of the brain. An interactive viewer by Alexander Huth lets you see what words lit up parts of the brain for one of the subjects.

Colors represent semantic categories such as numeric, social, and violent. Just click on a part of the brain to see which words most associated with an area (or a voxel they’re called). Pan, zoom, and rotate for various angles. [via @wattenberg]

Tags: brain, words

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29Aug / 2012

Bad words: Nebraska declares many words and names to be off limits when spelled/written

For immediate release
From the Nebraska State Government Headquarters

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In response to criticisms of our handling of the sign language based signing of a child's name we have decided that it would only be rationale to also apply the same standard to written and spoken words. Therefore, be it declared that any words or names that are one letter substitution away from anything bad should be banned.

For example, due to the danger associated with the word G-U-N (which we note - we are just spelling here but not actually writing the word) the following names have been banned: GUS, GUY and the following words are not allowed either GUM, GUY, BUN, RUN, SUN, FUN, GIN, PUN, GUT

For similar reasons it has been deemed that the following names and words to be banned:

Names: Ash, Bart, Buck, Butch, Cam, Coco, Dick, Dirk, Fitch, Huck, Luck, Mitch, Nick, Santorum, Tito
Words: abs, ads, ash, ask, asp, batch, bits, buck, bum, bunt, butch, can't, cart, cent, chit, cub, cud, cup, cut, dart, deck, dice, dink, disk, diss, ditch, dock, dock, duck, fare, farm, fits, fort, funk, hiss, hitch, hits, hum, hunt, itch, jock, kick, kiss, kits, lick, lock, luck, miss, mock, muck, mum, nits, part, pick, pitch, pits, puck, punt, rock, rum, runt, santorum, shin, ship, shot, sick, sits, skit, slit, snit, sock, spit, such, sum, tart, tats, tick, tins, tips, tots, tuck, wart, witch, wits, yuck, yum

To help everyone out we have organized the names into clusters based on the banned word (which we would rather not spell out here).

Group 1: