Summary: <br> <a rel="noreferrer noopener external" href="https://twitter.com/JamesKerLindsay" target="_blank" data-wpel-link="external">James Ker-Lindsay</a> is <a rel="noreferrer noopener external" href="https://www.lse.ac.uk/LSEE-Research-on-South-Eastern-Europe/People/James-Ker-Lindsay" target="_blank" data-wpel-link="external">Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics</a>. His research focuses on conflict, peace and security in South East Europe (Western Balkans, Greece, Turkey and Cyprus), European Union enlargement, and secession and recognition in international politics. <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> He has created many <a href="https://www.youtube.com/@JamesKerLindsay/videos" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener external" data-wpel-link="external">Youtube videos</a> explaining his subject.<br> <br> <br> <br> *****<br> <br> <br> <br> The <a href="https://www.bmj.com/content/bmj/380/bmj.p529.full.pdf" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">Financial Times recently made a change to their style guide</a>. The style guide of a newspaper is a list of rules about how articles should be written, all big newspapers have them, it’s to keep the language and spelling and so on consistent across the whole publication.<br> <br> <br> <br> So most style guides specify, for example, that numbers up to ten should be spelled out, and numbers from 11 onwards are written as digits. They also say what spelling or what grammar style to use if there is more than one version considered correct.<br> <br> <br> <br> The change that the Financial Times made was to treat the word ‘data’ as a singular rather than as a plural. That means instead or writing ‘the data are showing’ something, they will use English the way most of us do and write ‘the data is showing’ whatever.<br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> There is a concept in linguistics … yes, I did study it, in case you didn’t notice that before … the concept is in sociolinguistics, which is about the interaction between language and society, called hypercorrect.<br> <br> <br> <br> Correct language is pretty easy to understand for the most part, if I say ‘the dog are barking’ that’s easy to spot as being incorrect grammar, if I say ‘the dog is barking’ you all know that’s correct. But it’s important to understand that those rules aren’t made up by some professor in an academy somewhere. The correct use of a language is the way it is spoken by its speakers; dictionaries and grammar books describe the language, they don’t proscribe it.<br> <br> <br> <br> So ‘the dog are barking’ is clearly wrong, but if, instead of saying ‘the dog is always barking’, if instead of that I say ‘the dog does be barking all the time’, that is not incorrect grammar. It’s not an error, it’s not wrong, it’s not nearly incorrect, it’s not a mistake at all. ‘The dog does be barking all the time’ is not standard English, it’s a Hiberno-English dialect, but saying ‘the dog does be barking all the time’ conforms with the rules of that dialect, that’s why it is emphatically not wrong and not a mistake.<br> <br> <br> <br> Now, it’s true that standard English is sometimes considered to have a higher-status than some dialects of Hiberno-English, so you mightn’t want to use that in a job interview, or if you were reading the news, but that’s a different argument.<br> <br> <br> <br> Lots of people speak different languages, and even the people who don’t can often speak several different dialects, or registers, of their own language, and it’s very common to signal the type of interaction that you’re having with someone by what register you speak to them in. In a lot of European languages this is formally marked out, there is a distinction between tu and vous in French, Du and Sie in German. In English, that distinction is not so formalised, but it does exist, you hear it in things like the switch between using ‘I haven’t got’ and ‘I don’t have’.<br> <br> <br> <br> But the thing about the distinction being more subtle in English is that it c...
