From The Columbia Journalism Review:
Backed by the cheery fiddle and guitar of Tom Moss’s “Gypsy Night Dance,” the bespectacled white-haired gentleman in a blue blazer, striped bow tie, and pocket square is holding forth on the language issue of the day.
“I’m sometimes asked,” he tells the camera, speaking patiently but gesturing intensely, “‘Is “data” singular or plural?’ The answer is yes.”
During his puckish two-minute presentation, John E. McIntyre will parse the difference between “data” and “datum,” broach whether “media” indicates one or many, and conclude reassuringly, “Latin is not the boss of us.”
. . . .
McIntyre, the night content production manager at the Baltimore Sun, is one of an increasingly visible and robust breed of public masters of style and usage who have parlayed journalistic copy-desk expertise into an enthusiastic online following. In an age of texting and tweeting, these folks are trying to keep the mother tongue healthy, and their presence constitutes a refreshing renaissance for a profession that is generally underappreciated and rarely noticed—until, of course, a mistake shows up in print.
. . . .
Any general, newfound attention to grammatical, spelling, and punctuation standards may well have begun with the unexpected 2003 success of Lynne Truss’s Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Copy Editing. Further gains arrived via Mignon Fogarty, a former technical writer who now holds the Donald W. Reynolds Chair in Media Entrepreneurship at the University of Nevada. In 2006 she cast herself as “Grammar Girl” and commenced on a series of podcasts that, according to Newsday, “sparked what you might call a worldwide, syntax-driven fiesta.”
“I didn’t know all the rules,” Fogarty recalls. “I was constantly looking things up in the AP Stylebook and the Chicago Manual of Style. And I wanted to convey it to other people. My goal was not to show how superior I was. I just wanted to help people learn.”
Link to the rest at Columbia Journalism Review
For general grammatical fun, I enjoy Captain Grammar Pants on Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/Captain-Grammar-Pants-247802875254452/
for those who want to be ‘real’ scientists
THEORY
a supposition or a system of ideas intended to explain something, esp. one based on general principles independent of the thing to be explained: Darwin’s theory of evolution.
• a set of principles on which the practice of an activity is based: a theory of education | music theory.
• an idea used to account for a situation or justify a course of action: my theory would be that the place has been seriously mismanaged.
• Mathematics a collection of propositions to illustrate the principles of a subject.
PHRASES
in theory used in describing what is supposed to happen or be possible, usually with the implication that it does not in fact happen: in theory, things can only get better; in practice, they may well become a lot worse.
ORIGIN late 16th cent. (denoting a mental scheme of something to be done): via late Latin from Greek theōria ‘contemplation, speculation,’ from theōros ‘spectator.’
HYPOTHESIS
a supposition or proposed explanation made on the basis of limited evidence as a starting point for further investigation: professional astronomers attacked him for popularizing an unconfirmed hypothesis.
• Philosophy a proposition made as a basis for reasoning, without any assumption of its truth.
ORIGIN late 16th cent.: via late Latin from Greek hupothesis ‘foundation,’ from hupo ‘under’ + thesis ‘placing.’
–(Natural Science) A tentative theory or supposition
provisionally adopted to explain certain facts, and to
guide in the investigation of others; hence, frequently
called a working hypothesis.
Yay.
There’s also:
Notion: “A notion in philosophy is a reflection in the mind of real objects and phenomena in their essential features and relations. Notions are usually described in terms of scope and content. This is because notions are often created in response to empirical observations (or experiments) of covarying trends among variables.”
Too many try to pass notions off as theories or, more often, proven fact.
Grammar Girl is good for specifics when you already have a clue of what she’s talking about. I’ve found that readers who have no idea often get the wrong impression, for reasons that really are a natural consequence of technical writing by an expert.
(The bane of expertise: omitted transitions and use of turns of phrase that are precise in context but that can mean other things to a non-expert.)
Decimate has a specific meaning but we (society) use it as a more general term.
Don’t even get me started on Theory vs Hypothesis. That drives Science teachers nuts when society switches treats them as the same or switches the meaning.
I love that example. I use theory/hypothesis as a shibboleth to determine whether someone is really a scientist or just plays one on the internet.