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A comment on *@gmail.com. Parent comment

Re:*@gmail.com by falcor84 on Thursday August 31, 2023 @06:46AM (#37335142)
Sorry to nitpick, but I believe that "anecdata" is strictly plural and as such "one anecdata" is grammatically incorrect. It should probably be just "one anecdote", but if you want to emphasize the "data" aspect, I'd go with "one point of anecdata" or more concisely - "one anecdatum".

Somewhat surprisingly to me, "anecdatum" has apparently never yet appeared in print [0], and I'm happy for the two of us to share credit in coining it.

[0] https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=anecdatum

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:*@gmail.com by TonyTrapp on Thursday August 31, 2023 @07:22AM (#37335479)
Anecdata is a humorous term for "anecdotal evidence", i.e. it is not real "data".

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/anecdata#Noun

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Re:*@gmail.com by numpad0 on Thursday August 31, 2023 @08:06AM (#37335889)
I think the problem he has with the word is data is the plural(!) for singular datum. So one data is datum, two cactuses are cacti, and two datas is data. Maybe not always colloquially but technically. Hence anecdatum and anecdata.
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Re:*@gmail.com by seatsniffer on Thursday August 31, 2023 @10:21AM (#37337582)
It depends on where you are. In the US it's like you say. But in the UK for example they will often use data as singular.
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Re:*@gmail.com by stvltvs on Thursday August 31, 2023 @11:53AM (#37339167)
"Datum" is rarely used in the US, unless you want to sound pretentious. (This coming from someone who cringes every time "who/whom" is used incorrectly.) We use "data" as an uncountable noun.
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