Tuesday Thought: Subject-verb (dis)agreement # 1

Here's a headline from the New York Times Business Day (January 3, 2009):

Data Shows Manufacturing Is Suffering In All Corners

The word data is the plural of datum, so the verb should be plural: show. But as many arbiters of usage point out, the singular datum is almost never used, so why not treat data as a collective singular noun? Because it is still useful to differentiate a true plural from the collective singular.

The New York Times piece cites many numbers: for the manufacturing index, new orders index, employment index, purchasing managers index, and so on.

It then continues:

The worsening data, combined with a stream of company profit warnings, production cuts and layoffs, raises the pressure on policy makers to step up their efforts to bolster their economies.

Those data are specific and countable not general and collective, so the verb should be the plural raise--as in the January 7 Wall Street Journal's World Watch:

Data Raise Likelihood of Big Interest-Rate Cut

When to use the singular? Good data is a good thing. And at CDI data is almost always plural.