…and Ticketmaster.
Or, as I call it “Ticketbastard”.
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Louis Louis Louis!!
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Yeah, that’s pretty cool; I’m imagining Warren giving the speech again and again, with Clinton saying ‘I am examining fine and tolerable solutions to this grating side to Schumpeterian Profitability’ only to be elected in a landslide when Warren gives it again with Clinton replying “…and?”
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No one is ever going to accuse you of shirking your duty.
In fact none of them are actually monopolies in any traditional sense of the word. However if one’s purpose in life is to complain then one must stretch the meaning of words. Even if not, stretching the meaning of words is ever so fashionable these days! Note also:
Not a one of these are literally true but the hyperbole level is up there with accusing XYZ, Inc. of being a monopoly.
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‘Clap-fest’ sounds contagious.
This is a great part among the many great parts.
…
[C]oncentrated markets create concentrated political power.
The larger and more economically powerful these companies get, the more resources they can bring to bear on lobbying government to change the rules to benefit exactly the companies that are doing the lobbying. …
This is a big one – and it should terrify every conservative who hates government intervention.
…
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The word ‘data’ is used as both a plural count noun and a mass noun.
Count nouns are essentially digital (one chair, two chairs…) while mass nouns are effectively analog (some sand, much sand, craploads of sand…)
Mass nouns take singular grammatical “furniture”:
“Sand is dry, water is wet, data is weird…” are all perfectly grammatical English phrases…
Suggested further reading:
Language Log:[“The data are”: How fetishism makes us stupid] (http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4396)
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Feel free to send a sternly written letter to The Economist, Google, Elizabeth Warren, and the rest of the world that uses the term as a plural and let them know their fetishism is making them stupid for using data as a plural.
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But “data” is not a mass noun because mass nouns are singular, whereas ‘data’ is the plural of ‘datum’. Sand and water do have plural forms; large expanses of sand are often called “sands” as in the Goodwin Sands, and “waters” is used to mean multiple streams or bodies of water. So the cases are different.
There are several words in English that have a plural form only for a particular meaning. For instance, cloth and clothes, glass and glasses. And datum and data also have different meanings, since “datum” is used to mean a reference point, as in “datum line”.
So singular data goes against custom and practice in English, because we say “these glasses are dirty” or “the clothes are wet.”
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[quote=“nemomen, post:49, topic:80835, full:true”]
Feel free to send a sternly written letter to The Economist, Google, Elizabeth Warren, and the rest of the world that uses the term as a plural and let them know their fetishism is making them stupid for using data as a plural.[/quote]
Gosh, thanks for giving me permission to do that.
The generosity of this community never ceases to amaze me. (-:
Just letting you know you’re directing your ire at the wrong party. I actually use the word as a mass noun, since that’s my preferred usage. At the same time, I’m not a prescriptivist, so your efforts at persuading me are misguided on many levels. So far as I’m concerned using it as a mass noun or a plural noun are equally acceptable, since both are perfectly clear.
(edit: added)
As a separate note, if you’re hoping to persuade someone of your point, directing someone to an article titled, “How fetishism makes us stupid,” is guaranteed to fail.
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Have a cookie. 
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I’d say Ticketbastard is the devil, but that seems unfair to Satan. Those fuckers are such corrupt, venue-intimidating, performer-blackballing, advertiser-ball-fondling, customer-gouging, scalper-enabling parasites that even Hell’s subbasement would be too good for them. Their blood-sucking benighted souls deserve to be shelled from their rotting flesh by a million ravenous scarab beetles and plunged into an eternal loop of Bieber fever while staring forever lidless at Saddam Hussein and Dick Cheney’s coke-fueled naked twerking!
Not a big fan of Ticketmaster, in case it was hard to tell.
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This made me wonder what William Safire (for those who don’t know, he wrote a syndicated column On Language) would have said about it, but googling didn’t reveal anything (though I came across an interesting story about a secretary of commerce who went on a clear-writing campaign. That person wrote “Use the precise word or phrase: datum (singular), data (plural)…”).
What I did find was this lovely tidbit at the beginning of one of his books, something to keep in mind anytime the subject of language and prescriptive vs descriptive uses comes up:
" A note about Authority: In these pages, you will be given The Word about The Words. Here is what I think about what is correct and constructive, what is imprecise and destructive. You may disagree, as many of my articulate and scholarly (or plain ornery) readers do. It’s your language too, buddy; if you want to abuse it and muddle it up, you will do that for yourself, not for me. If, on the other hand, you are willing to think about how we communicate, and consider the words and the forms of grammar, then you are automatically a member of the Authority, entitled to a ring and a secret handshake and the thrill of membership."
I like his attitude about it.
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I used to work for Ticketbastard for about a year, and I can’t disagree with anything you said. Many of my co-workers were wonderful people, but I did not like the company itself. They would not let employees buy tickets at all, because if we scalped them would have interfered with whatever organized crime arrangement they had. And the ventilation system of our office had some kind of fungus spores which made us sick.
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Thank you .
How exactly is she ‘on fire’ when she’s out stumping for a corrupt, wall street profiteering, 1% crook like Clinton?
Oh. Right. Team Blue.
What would you make of it if Warren became Clinton’s running mate?
Because she has a greater capacity to reform the system from within. Unsarcastically.
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That she can be bought?
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