Missed one point. I am pretty sure you can't allow cliff.

Side point - Found a fantastic definition of a silent F in the Urban Dictionary...

Yelling "fuck" without warning at the top of your lungs in a public place resulting in silent stares by all those in earshot.

Surely Proper nouns just don't count?

Marijuana - Marry-you-ahna the J is the inflection at the beginning of the 2nd syllable.

Autumn - I have heard the N pronounced, also related to autumnal - it's 50:50 for me.

Wednesday - Should be pronounced wed - ens - day, I don't, but that's correct.

Phlegm relates to Phlegmatic in which the G is pronounced, I think it counts but it's arguable.

Often is often pronounced off-tun.

Foreign words are tricky to draw a line on. Can we say that words borrowed from other languages in which that word is still used and the word is recognizably foreign, don't count? I'm not sure. Faux, for example, is clearly French but they borrowed it too.

I'm struggling to think of a word that hasn't been borrowed and bastardized somewhere. In fact, I can think of one, Dog, for which no one knows the origin. Until very recently we only had the word hound.

With regard to my missing capital letter, for which I apologise if necessary, there is a difference between a typing error and wilful destruction of our language.

I never said the data has no place in the language, just that the the above point about use of the mythical word, datums, is flawed in a literal sense because the example used mkes no sence. One cannot, in any sense, input a datum to a computer. One can, of course, input data which may later, be viewed or represented as a datum.

Is it acceptable to talk about "this data", or should we always say "these data"?

My overall point is that this is a place for individuals, who are supposed to care about our language, to discuss it. Yet all the evidence points to the fact that those individuals are the very people who are destroying it. There is even a paragraph above this which has been ended with with the modern term "or whatever". That is actually painful to me.

Stand up to and act to preserve your language.

Operor non permissum nothus homo frendo vos solum.

I am getting angrier the more I read. there is not a single post completely devoid of any grammatical error or some mistake in punctuation. We might as well all start using text speak and using modernisms such as "or whatever" when we have difficulty correctly terminating our sentences.

I despair!

Kev - you too have no place in this. Every key stroke of data entered into a computer is equal to at least 8 bits, or a byte. It is therefore not possible to enter a datum into a computer, only data.

I suppose if you were entering a single co-ordinate, for example, this could be described as a datum but data will always be correct because of the way computers handle data, there will always have to be more than a single bit!

DamonTarlaei, Latin scholar my p?dex, Octopus is latinised Greek, therefore the correct plural is octopodes. The internet is not for the likes of you to spout regurgitated nonsense and ill-informed, putrid falsehoods. Switch it off and go away!