data minding

“Google unveiled ... a new tool that reports on ... government monitoring the internet ...Google’s new tool showed, at its launch, the number of requests for information from various countries between July 1 and Dec. 31, 2009. The data is broken down by country, and if you click on a specific country, you get details like what percentage of requests for data removal the company complied with. Google has been candid about the fact that the data is not complete” ("Google and Government Monitoring"/NYT 5/2/10).
Is the data incomplete or are the data incomplete? Many argue that the singular verb is justified by data being a non-count or mass noun. However, non-count nouns refer to entities that “are viewed as an undifferentiated mass, like furniture, bread, cheese, coffee” (Greenbaum, Oxford English Grammar). This definition does not quite work for data since data are “facts that were gathered in order to be studied,” clearly indicating a collection (=similar things brought and kept together) of different pieces of information, for example "all your activities online and off," that are to be scrutinized. This scrutiny is called data mining and a rather spooky business .
Data (plural of datum), like many other nouns is borrowed from Latin. Nouns with a Latin or Greek origin often retain their foreign plural forms. Thus former students of a university are alumni (alumnus), many books have indices (index), and bacteria (bacterium) can cause diseases.
Another Latin word, antenna, takes two different plurals, antennas when it refers to the rabbit ears on top of an outmoded TV or antennae when it denotes the two feelers on an insect’s head. For again other nouns, two different plural forms commonly are accepted, e.g. formulae/formulas or memoranda/memorandums.
But back to data and those nouns that end in –a. They are often treated as singular although they are indeed plural, for example media, trivia or memorabilia. Since the word media refers to all types of news organizations, from newspapers to TV, its meaning is plural. Trivia, unimportant facts - or the stuff of Jeopardy, and memorabilia, the stuff we collect, similarly refer to a group of very distinct pieces and should be followed by a plural verb - as does the word data. Only someone who collects all the right data “can produce an effect which seems remarkable to his neighbor, because the latter has missed the one little point which is the basis of the deduction"(Sherlock Holmes).
By the way, the spaghetti (or rigatoni or gnocchi or ravioli) are cooked, graffiti were painted on the wall, and one cannot eat only one biscotti.

Here are some examples of foreign nouns and their plurals.

alga/algae
amoeba/amoebae
analysis/analyses
antenna/1)antennae/2)antennas
appendix/appendices
axis/axes
bacterium/bacteria
bacillus/bacilli
basis/bases
cactus/cacti
crisis/crises
criterion/criteria
(datum)/data
diagnosis/diagnoses
emphasis/emphases
(erratum)/errata
focus/foci
fungus/fungi
formula/formulae/formulas
hypothesis/hypotheses
index/indices
larva/larvae
matrix/matrices
medium/media
(memorabilium)/memorabilia
(minutia)/minutiae
neurosis/neuroses
oasis/oases
parenthesis/parentheses
phenomenon/phenomena
radius/radii
stimulus/stimuli
syllabus/syllabuses/syllabi
thesis/theses
vertebra/vertebrae

The Dos and Don'ts

Style manuals disagree on the use of –‘s for plurals of so-called non-noun words. Some allow the apostrophe to avoid ambiguity as in the headline “The I's Have It.” The apostrophe seems necessary to clearly convey the article's topic, the use of the personal pronoun I. Without an apostrophe, the heading would read “The Is have It” and would be ambiguous, unless the author had decided to use lower case for the heading ("the Is have it) and thus avoided the dilemma.
But what about the plural of do and don’t? “For an inexperienced player, a golf putt can seem like an endless checklist of do's and don'ts” ("The Superstar effect"). If the apostrophe is used in do’s to indicate the plural of do, then the plural of don’t would logically be don’t’s and not don'ts.
Ben Zimmer in the NYT recently used noes as the plural of no, adding the e probably to follow the examples of tomatoes, potatoes and heroes. Applying this rule to do, would suggest to form the plural as does, which doesn’t work because does would be mistaken as a verb, the 3rd person singular of to do.
Although Zimmer in the same article uses the word yes repeatedly, he never does so in the plural. Similar to nouns such as lens/lenses, however, the plural of yes, indeed needs an additional e to make the yeses audible.
Which leaves us with the wheres and hows of doing something, the buts and sorrys (or sorries?) about having done something not quite satisfactorily, and the whos (or whoes?) we don't know by name. Using apostrophes is not recommendable since who's, how's or where's are the contractions of who is, how is or where is.
So, using non-noun words in the plural obviously creates quite a mess. Moreover, since –’s is used to indicate the possessive of a noun, it creates confusion if we also use it to form a word’s plural. Yet, since we pluralize numbers such as hundreds and dozens and compounds like stand-bys and close-ups by simply adding an s, the same rule could also apply to dos and don’ts, to nos and yeses, to whos and whats, and to the maybes we might raise regarding this whole issue or to the sorrys for having to use those non-noun words in the first place.

According to MLA, apostrophes are not permissible for plurals of numbers, acronyms, and abbreviations

*The roaring 1920s (compared to 2010’s best movies)
*The three sevens in a phone number.
*MAs (compared to a PhD’s advantages)
*CDs (compared to a PC’s hard drive)
*YMCAs (compared to the YMCA’s rules for membership)

Exceptions are

*Letters of the alphabet referred to as the letters themselves with the letter italicized but not the 's (Mind your p’s and q’s!)
*Words that are referred to as the word itself with the word italicized but not the 's (All his our’s and are’s are misspelled.)