Mea Culpa: How much in dollars and how many data?

Our chief pedant refers to (not references) trouble with currencies and plurals in this week's Independent

Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive of Facebook, which bought Instagram in 2012

Converting foreign money amounts into pounds so often leads to mistakes that I wonder why we bother.

We got it wrong twice in a story on Thursday about a legal threat by Facebook against a British clean-up app called Littergram. We reported a pompous letter from the “social media empire”, an elegant variation of which I rather approve, telling Danny Lucas, who created Littergram, that its name was too like Instagram, which is owned by Facebook. What next? Are shops going to get an email from Mark Zuckerberg telling them not to sell things by the kilogram?

We said that Facebook’s earnings for the first quarter of 2016 were “$1.5bn (£1m)”, and we made the same mistake in the picture caption, which said that Facebook bought Instagram in 2012 for the same amount, “$1.5bn (£1m)”. We meant £1bn both times, as any numerate reader would know.

Which goes to show that the conversion would have been pretty pointless even if we had got it right. There certainly seems little point in converting dollars and euros. Most people know that a dollar and a euro are each worth more than 50p and less than £1 and so amounts are of the same order in pounds, but a bit less.

More than one datum: Julian Self wrote to question this assertion in a report on Thursday: “The amount of data in the world roughly doubles each year.” He asked if it should be, “The number of data in the world.” I don’t think so. Most people use “data” as a mass noun, as a quantity of stuff. Using it as a plural (of datum) is old-fashioned, harmless pedantry, but to talk about the number of data sounds peculiar and would distract the reader.

I am more interested in whether the statement is true, and for how long it can continue to be so.

How many Ises? A report, also on Thursday, was headlined: “Isis in Iraq: Terror group are turning to fish farms and car dealerships to fund activities after losing territory.” A group doesn’t have to be singular, but in this case we were talking about Isis, which is. Our style is that sports teams and music groups are plural but that companies and other organisations are singular, and Isis is in the second category.

Not that it matters much, but the story started: “Isis has turned to running car dealerships and fish farms to offset their diminishing oil income.” Some things can be singular or plural, but not both in the same sentence.

Work of reference: I know that language changes, but some changes are not for the better. The vogue for using “to reference” instead of “to refer to”, for instance, which I assume is a usage that seeped from academic texts.

On Monday, we quoted Serzh Sargsyan, the president of Armenia: “Referencing the fighting in Nagorno-Karabakh, he said: ‘We will not allow another Armenian Genocide.’” Then on Tuesday we reported the fuss about the identity of “the woman Beyoncé seemingly referenced in a song about infidelity on the singer’s latest album Lemonade”.

I think “referring to” and “referred to” would have been less pretentious and more elegant.