Fiddling
Wednesday, March 14th, 2007Gordon Brown, who doesn’t look much of a football fan to me, was going on about how England had the stadia to host the 2018 World Cup. Excuse me? Stadia? Are we going back to Roman times? Will we be able to use these stadia afterwards for secutor v retiarius, for Longleat’s excess lions to do battle with leather-clad bestiarius? Or is it bestarii?
Well, GB’s sort of correct. In Latin, stadia would be the correct plural of stadium. But Latin’s a dead language, and English isn’t. There are lots of Latin words in our language, but we’ve twiddling with them for centuries in ways that would have Julius Caesar spitting in his cornflakes.
Last week was such an expensive one. I had to pay three insurance premia. On one of them, the data weren’t available to do it. But the end of the week, my stamina were totally run down. See what I mean?
On a course this week, I had someone who insisted that “data are” was correct. Maybe, I said. But would you say: “I have a piece of datum for you?”
Actually, I would still write medium rather than media, stratum rather than strata. In my days at The Times, the most erudite people I ever worked with, this wasn’t an issue. You had the feeling that all readers were required to show a decent grounding in Latin, and probably read Caesar’s Gallic Wars for fun. (The paper also made a thumping loss in those days, but it seemed a small price to pay.)
Though the singular of media and strata is still useful and usable, both will disappear from misuse, a bit like all right becoming alright. Does it matter? Or am I just a sad old language peeve? Maybe. But at least I haven’t joined Lynne Truss’s grammar police.