How ‘data’ became like ‘butter’

Someone on Radio 4 said she had heard about the sexism of Grand Theft Auto on ‘Women’s Hour’. It is called Woman’s Hour, though the other is possible, on the model of Children’s Hour. But I was struck in 2014 by a slide in certainty about singulars and plurals.

The three shakiest plurals are data, criteria and bacteria. Data has become not so much a singular noun as an uncountable one, like butter. So speakers can say ‘all the data collected is reliable’. Datum and criterion are almost extinct. A daily paper used a bacteria on its front page to mean a kind of bacterium.

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This shakiness is made worse by a change in the way that nouns are used attributively, qualifying other nouns. The rules of English had required them to keep in the singular: a dog biscuit, a vegetable expert, a pig-proof fence.