ATM Numbers Is Data for PIN Machines

To my great shame I've been spending a lot of time in Warframe lately. Shame, quoth the wolf, because fundamentally it ranks as precisely the sort of idiot-friendly "action" game against which I constantly rant here in my den. In keeping with its lowest-common-denominator mindset, its literary merits tend toward the none, as happens when you let art majors at the keyboard. Combined with struggling to secure its core demographic of degenerate teen troglodytes with no attention span, this produces a lot of cackling carbon copy cartoon villains, long strings of small words and re-redundancy to ensure the worthless little wastes of oxygen you seek to lure to your cash shop actually get what you're saying. You get what I'm saying?

So no-one can act surprised at catching radio transmissions warning of "subterranean" things "below ground" or hearing a villain threaten to perform a "live dissection" on the hero. I'm guessing he means it would be... televised? Or were you fishing for the term vivisection but mislaid thine trusty thesaurus?

And now, for something completely different.

"Pie Iesu Domine
Dona eis requiem"
*thunk*

Part of Monty Python's brilliance lay in the verisimilitude of each scene. Exposition and decor often provided as serious a contrast as possible to the anticipated humor, like a taut bowstring, punchlines nocked. Mastery of a craft is neither strained nor accidental, but deliberate and parsimonious. That village scene might have looked perfectly at home in any drama or documentary reenactment - that is, until the *thunk* connects.

And now, for something completely different.

A PhD is a permit to peddle pedantry, but every once in a while academia seems to suffer a crisis of over-production in that department. One fad of the past decade holds the word "data" must never be used in the singular, as it is in fact the plural of the singular datum. So it's always "the data show" and not "the data shows" under penalty of severe finger-wagging. Correct, yet irrelevant. When in Satan's holy name does anyone speak of dealing with a singular datum? With the datum at hand? With the datum so far? With the datum we've been able to gather? Collecting datum? Lt. Commander Datum? It's understood that one always analyzes a collection of data, a cluster of data, a pattern of data, a group of data, a pack of data, a herd of data, a pod of data, a swarm of data, a murder of data, like in that one episode where they almost took his brain apart, man that was awesome...

...
Ahem.
There are plenty of times when the misuse of language will blatantly signal ignorance or muddled thinking. Placing your subterrane below ground is merely redundant, not clearer or more expressive, expansive or emotive. But the singular data better expresses the reality of clustering information, succinctly and without fuss. It is apt, neither gratuitous nor forced for the sake of group cohesion. You're missing the punchline. The rules make good exposition and decor but they're not the point of this whole show. By vandalizing a more apt expression you're merely advertising your deficiency in mastering language in all its literally figurative glory. And please, if you must cling so tightly to your stone tablets, at least learn their usage from the monks in that video.
*THUNK*