The Angry Grammarian

by Jeffrey Barg

“Try” Cycle of Doom

One of the things that drives me nuts is “try and” instead of “try to.” Yet I see it everywhere, even in professionally edited books and magazines. I’m constantly correcting my students, but now I'm wondering if I’m being too tough. Is it acceptable to say, “I’m going to try and fix this company” as opposed to “I’m going to try to fix this company”?

No! You’re fighting the good fight. An uphill one, for sure, but it’s a battle that needs to be fought. “Try and” is one of those verbal bastardizations, and its imprecision is maddening.

When “try” means “attempt,” it usually needs to be followed by an infinitive—a verb with a “to” in front of it. Saying you’re going to “try and fix” is too many actions: trying and fixing. You’re doing only one (fixing), and you’re not even guaranteeing success at that (just trying). “Try and fix” implies two separate actions, which is giving yourself way too much credit. Ergo, people who say “try and” are conceited and boastful.

I know, I know—old habits die hard. And “try and” is easier to say. So let’s find a middle ground: Use a gerund.

I won’t even make you remember what a gerund is. Just remember that “-ing” is always preferable to “try and” (“I’m going to try fixing this company”), and I’ll try forgetting how conceited and boastful you used to be.

When is “data” singular and when it is plural?

Traditionally, “data” has been used in the plural when talking about lots of individual pieces of information (“The data have been gathered”), and snobs will tell you this is preferable.

Snobs are wrong.

Virtually any usage of the word “data” can be interpreted as either singular (“a set of data has been gathered”) or plural (as above), so it’s best to default to the singular usage. It sounds less clunky, and the decision can be almost universally defended.

But for God’s sake, don’t ever use the singular “datum.” Exhaustive data shows that people who use “datum” need to be smacked.