

It's 'bacteria', not 'bacterium' - jipumarino
http://arstechnica.com/science/2010/10/giant-virus-found-in-tiny-predator/?comments=1&post=20945281#comment-20945281

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pfortuny
There is a little problem with the pedantic poster (the commenter at ars)...

Bacteria comes from 'bacteria' in greek, which means 'rod' or 'stick' (walking
stick). The fact that some people neolatinized and fabricated a 'bacterium'
means absolutely nothing.

If you want to be pedantic, say 'bacterion' and 'bacteria', but then again you
would probably write it 'bakterion'.

Wikipedia is not the definitive source for a lot of things, least of all this.

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Metatron
Came in expecting a prescriptivist ranting about the roots of our language and
got a fairly level-headed rant at language loons prescribing things wrongly. I
enjoyed it.

All living languages are subject to continual change anyhow, that's the rule
that should stop people from dictating how we use the language. Language is
just there for us to pass on information, in most cases of nitpicking that
gets overlooked.

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petercooper
_Because of the physical size of bacteria, the word became a mass noun and
functions as both plural and singular. Same reason for taking "data": it is
collective._

I had to look this up and it's far from authoritative but Wikipedia doesn't
seem to think that's _entirely_ true for data, at least (that is, you may say
"a bacteria" but you do not say "a data"): <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data>

_In English, the word datum is still used in the general sense of "an item
given". [..] Any measurement or result is a datum, but data point is more
usual [..] Even when a very small quantity of data is referenced (one number,
for example) the phrase piece of data is often used, as opposed to datum. The
debate over appropriate usage is ongoing._

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olympus
I am glad that someone who knows more about language than I do can make a
sophisticated sounding arguement that I can regurgitate to make myself sound
smart. Who cares if it's correct or not, I can belittle a lot of people with
words like these.

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Sandman
I just had to check which rules apply to some other words, like 'stadium' and
'forum'. Turns out that both 'stadiums' and 'stadia' are valid plurals of
'stadium' while 'forums' is the preferred plural of 'forum', although 'fora'
is not incorrect.

[1]<http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/stadium#Noun>
[2]<http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/forum#Noun>

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asveikau
Speaking of "stadium", that's another one of those Greek words where we go
around repeating the Latinized version. It might be more properly "stadion".

