Supplementary Outcome Data on Treatment for Psychological Morbidity in General Practice: Some Cautionary Remarks

seem to have trouble with its neuter plural as well, referring to ‘a symposia’. Maybe it would be safer to stick to another synonym in English, seminar, from the Latin semen for seed, but I have once had to spring to the defence of a distinguished woman psychiatrist subjected to sexist comments from fellow psychiatrists about this derivation. Some of the misused neuter forms are past participles. The commonest in psychiatric writing is data, the past participle, neuter of the verb dare, to give. Datum is a thing given and data are things given. Most editors of scientific journals will root out any clause such as ‘the data is’, but it is heard frequently elsewhere. Is there an instinct that regards the word as a singular collective noun as media has supposed to have become? Still more of our misused neuters have originated in Greek. Your literate Roman of the classical age writing in the Latin language did not feel compelled to incorporate words from the Greek in which he would also have been literate. Some found their way into Latin much later than the classical period and found hospitality in the neuter gender. Tw o favourites in psychiatry whose plurals are often abused are criterion (κριτηριον) and phenomenon (φαινομενον), which take their Latin neuter plurals correctly as criteria and phenomena. One hears the plural of both used so often as the singular, ‘a criteria’ or ‘a phenomena’ and, worse, the plurals as ‘criterias’ and ‘phenomenas’. It sometimes seems that the only correct singular popular use is the name of the pub in Hay Street, Perth, ‘The Criterion’ and doubtless another hundred similar hostelries around Australia. We could run through the Latin gerundives in common use such as corrigenda, memoranda, pro paganda, referring to things that require correcting, remembering or propagating. All are neuter plurals and all are often misused. Is it worth worrying about? If the general gist of the communication gets through, does the use of expressions like ‘the criterias’or ‘the data is. ’really matter? There is a school of educational thought which has resulted in our children being kept in ignorance of the grammar of their language on the grounds that, if it communicates the idea, it is alright. There are two objections to this approach. One is that violations of the logic of our grammar such as using a plural subject to a singular verb does identify poor writing even to those who must rely on their instincts rather than a knowledge of grammar. The other is the potential for contradiction and confusion when rules regarded as unnecessary are broken. An example is whether one medium, criterion or forum is being referred to or more than one. Sometimes the number will change within a sentence with an inevitable confusion if only the plural version of the word is used. But most of all, as psychiatrists whose predecessors brought the study of sex out into the open, we should not join in the prissiness that avoids the very use of the word sex and the substitution of the inferior one, gender, with its consequent confusion of grammatical usage in the very plurality that sex demands.