Plural pedantry (was Re: [plug] stripping potentially nasty attachments)

[James Devenish]

In message <20040327091459.GC7528 at patrick.wattle.id.au>
on Sat, Mar 27, 2004 at 05:14:59PM +0800, Cameron Patrick wrote:
> Heard someone the other day talking about "a minima".  Urgh!

"A phenomena" and "a bacteria" are particularly popular on...TV (gasp).
My personal favourite is a little slip-of-the-tongue that mathematicians
and engineers might recognise: "a matricie" ;-) Another cringeworthy
example is RedHat's "this errata".

> Though I suppose it's the same as what's happened to datum/data.

I love how a "datum" is supposed to be superseded by "data point".

PS. Don't forget our little problem with 'their'.