Fine-Tuning 6, Tricky Plurals

I prefer using the plural from the orginal language, e.g. terminus, termini; bacterium, bacteria; matrix, matrices; parenthesis, parentheses; criterion, criteria; schema, schemata.

Another point of interest are those words, which have the same form in singular as in plural and do not change at all: barracks, fish ... ,

Hi Walter, Any form of the plural is fine with me. I just can't bear to hear people using the plural as a singular. Someone sent me a message in which she said, "phenomena is ..." That's wrong no matter what kind of plural you prefer.

Hi Wy, According to Webster's, there's no distinction between the plural for our body part and the plural for a part of a book. However, I'm inclined to agree with you.

I believe that, wrt data, this word has , in its original singular, a meaning that is so unique. It stands for the geographic basis from which a map is made. Therefore the daTUM OF A GEOGRAPHIC PRESENTATION, can be made of data, or a single piece of data. It gets awkward sounding when we use the datum based upon a single datum of elevation.
I believe we can blame English surveyors for the gradual acceptance of data as sing or plu.
Ive seen, in the scientific literature, blunders of everyday usage be published and set in concrete. Some of my American Journals piss on the rules monthly, while most Canadian Journals, by their adherence to strict language rules, sound almost Victorian.

Question for Roberta:

Why when a baseball player hits the ball to the outfield and the ball is caught, the player is said to have "flied out", not "flew out"?

I believe it has to do with a fly ball as a noun. and "to-fly" is the infinitive


i just made that up so that someone would put it in quotes , thus giving it instant credibility as a sage statement.

Does anybody know if it is possible to use STATUS as plural in English or do I have to use STATUSES?

farmerman, I know nothing of data/datum in the geographic sense. However, my handy-dandy dictionary says that the plural for datum, in the measurement sense, is datums. I'm stunned. However, I'm not stunned to learn that Americans are pissing all over the rules. We do it a lot. We're good at it.

New Haven, Ah, something near and dear to my heart. A baseball question. When someone hits a fly ball and the ball is caught, the player flied out. The past tense of fly in this instance and in this instance only is flied. Why? 'Cause it's baseball. This is the same sport that regards stealing as a good thing. From a language perspective, however, if you say that the player flew out, it suggests that the player did the flying and not the ball.

owi, The plural of status is statuses. Sorry. Not the most graceful word in the language, but what can you do?

I do a bit of site surveying now and then. We collect our data to map out a project base sheet. I find that our data are usually made up of individual point grades. I ain't never heard of datums, in the plural, and as I say we don't use datum in the singular. Hey, Joe, what is that datum you have in your hand?
But then I am no official surveyor, we just need a sense of how the land lies, fitfully or not.