Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2017 May 21

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May 21

backlash

Non-native speaker here. I have a question concerning the current usage of the word backlash, used without a qualifier, in political parlance: hitherto methought that a backlash can lash back at any lasher, leftward or rightward, but according to the German entry, which comes with a great many citations, it is by now synonymous with conservative/anti-progressive/reactionary backlash. Is that so? --2003:45:4B23:6300:D142:E45B:F20C:3B1 (talk) 11:09, 21 May 2017 (UTC)

If the German entry is correct, then the word in German is more restrictive than the English word.(see below). There is no requirement that a word with the same spelling has to mean the same in different languages. Perhaps someone fluent in German could comment? Dbfirs 11:17, 21 May 2017 (UTC)

Our article is actually at Backlash (sociology), though at this point it fails WP:DICDEF and should probably be redirected to the Wiktionary entry here. There is no particular political slant left or right to the English usage. Matt Deres (talk) 12:19, 21 May 2017 (UTC)

The meaning of the term Backlash in German is described in the monolingual Duden as 'Gegenreaktion, Gegenströmung; Konterschlag'. The German WP article is pure OR. --Pp.paul.4 (talk) 15:12, 21 May 2017 (UTC)

Note that a word can have different shades of meaning in two languages. For example, "molest" has come to mean "rape" in English, while it originally just meant "bother" (in old movies a woman might say to a cop "this man is molesting me"). In French, it retains the original meaning. StuRat (talk) 15:40, 21 May 2017 (UTC)

Molest doesn't mean rape in Britain. Itsmejudith (talk) 22:41, 21 May 2017 (UTC)

Interesting. So it can be used to just mean "bother" there ? StuRat (talk) 00:26, 22 May 2017 (UTC)

Perhaps slightly more than "bother". The OED definition is "To interfere or meddle with (a person, animal, etc.) injuriously or with hostile intent; to pester or harass, esp. in an aggressive or persistent manner." with a more recent sense of "To harass, attack, or abuse sexually." Most people in the UK would not use "molest" if they meant "rape", though I suppose it might be used as a euphemism in some circumstances. Dbfirs 06:54, 22 May 2017 (UTC)

Molest doesn't really mean rape in NA, either. Generally it refers to unwanted touching of a sexual nature. With regards to children ("child molestation" redirects to child sexual abuse in WP), it may be used as a euphemistic catch-all term where the details of the abuse aren't given. But a grown woman who was raped would not be said to have been molested. Matt Deres (talk) 11:09, 22 May 2017 (UTC)

In a sense, Vince McMahon molested God at Backlash in 2006. Nothing kinky about it, even if he had to do it with his son and through The Heartbreak Kid. InedibleHulk (talk) 10:50, 25 May 2017 (UTC)

Painting your opponent as being irritable and prone to knee-jerk reactions (which is what backlash implies) is a lefty tactic (the conservative counterpart is "immoral" or "unpatriotic" - or was before the whole Russia affair, anyway.) So it figures leftists would use it wrt conservatives more often than vice versa, plus conservatives may loathe to use a word that has come to be associated with how leftists talk (other than ironically, that is.) This will limit its usage to those kind of situations (i.e., liberals unhappy with conservatives) even further. Liberals don't lash back, their reaction when they don't get their way is one of incredulous dismay at conservatives' irrational obstinacy ("I can't even.") PS There's also "frontlash", which is sappy human interest stories detailing some minority's purported fear of backlash, appearing as if on command whenever something big and nasty happens. Asmrulz (talk) 00:17, 22 May 2017 (UTC)

That's not quite it. The concept is that progressives want to push forward, and conservatives want to rein things in, to pull back toward what they perceive as the "good old [conservative] days." To talk about liberal "backlash" doesn't quite fit. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 20:06, 24 May 2017 (UTC)

Oxford Dictionaries doesn't support the German article's claim, either for British or American English - in fact, their first example is ‘a public backlash against racism’. It doesn't match my experience either. Of the sources cited in the German article, I can only access the first, which says "In contemporary American usage, the term backlash appears to refer to recurring attempts by a privileged class to rescind recently won rights and liberties gained by an underprivileged group or class." (My emphasis). It looks to me as though the German article (and its sources) are cherry-picking examples to support their claim. Iapetus (talk) 08:39, 24 May 2017 (UTC)

The book Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women was semi-famous in the early 1990s, but I really don't think that it changed the meaning of the word "backlash" (not in English)... AnonMoos (talk) 19:44, 24 May 2017 (UTC)

Our article definitely needs some work. In its coverage of the "dementia tax" promised by the Tories in their election manifesto Tuesday's Daily Telegraph reported: --10:41, 25 May 2017 79.73.128.130

On Saturday Mrs May went canvassing and was filmed being told by a middle-aged woman that she had been "unnerved" by the policy ... As the backlash grew, Damian Green, the Work and Pensions Secretary, was despatched to the Andrew Marr show on Sunday to hold the line.

"Millions of data"?

"Data" and "information" are uncountable, right? Can I then say "millions of data"? And what about "information": Do I have to say "millions of pieces of information", which sounds a bit ponderous to me...? I'm very curious about your answers. Greetings--Erdic (talk) 18:49, 21 May 2017 (UTC)

Neither is "uncountable", but "millions of pieces of information" is correct, as is "millions of data" and "millions of items of data". Information is seldom seen in the plural in modern English so "informations" is often seen as incorrect, though it is still current in Scottish Law, and was used by Shakespeare, Swift, Carlyle and Robert Louis Stevenson. The singular of data is "datum", of course. Dbfirs 20:01, 21 May 2017 (UTC)

Dbfirs Swift links to the birds and Carlye is a disambiguation. CambridgeBayWeather, Uqaqtuq (talk), Sunasuttuq 16:05, 22 May 2017 (UTC)

Oops! Sorry! I usually check before linking, but I was in too much of a hurry here! I intended to link to Jonathan Swift and Thomas Carlyle of course. Dbfirs 16:40, 22 May 2017 (UTC)

• When using data as an uncountable noun, as with the uncountable information, you can say millions of pieces/items of data/information, but it flows better if you say lots of data/information, or a lot of data/information, or a huge amount of data/information, or (slightly more formally) very much data/information.

My feeling is that it's very rare to use data as a countable noun preceded by a specific count: these data is moderately common, but five data or millions of data sounds very strange to me. Loraof (talk) 20:15, 21 May 2017 (UTC)

Rare, but not unheard of. The singular is datum, which is still used in some contexts. It is used in philosophy (A premise from which conclusions are drawn) and in engineering (A fixed reference point). Wymspen (talk) 20:46, 21 May 2017 (UTC)

Incidentally, I (and I assume the OP) was using "uncountable noun" in the sense of mass noun. In the phrase millions of items of data, items is a countable noun while data is a mass noun, like coffee in millions of cups of coffee. Loraof (talk) 20:53, 21 May 2017 (UTC)

Datum and data are the singular and plural respectively. We can say "one datum" but not "two (or more) data". Are there other words that are countable in the singular but not in the plural? -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 23:01, 21 May 2017 (UTC)

In my English, "data" is a mass noun, and does not have a singular. I would not use "datum" at all. --ColinFine (talk) 23:22, 21 May 2017 (UTC)

Agreed. They started out as the singular and plural of the same word, but their meanings and usages have since diverged. StuRat (talk) 01:03, 22 May 2017 (UTC)

I suggest "millions of data points" as the most elegant way to say what you want. StuRat (talk) 01:05, 22 May 2017 (UTC)

Our article on Geodetic datum uses the word "datums" several times, which is correct in that context according to [1].--Shantavira|^{feed me} 06:38, 22 May 2017 (UTC)

In some contexts, "data point" is one expression that has replaced "datum" in the sense of "a single measurement". --PalaceGuard008 (Talk) 10:22, 22 May 2017 (UTC)

Thank you all very much! So, to sum things up, it would be actually incorrect to say "millions of data/information", right?--Erdic (talk) 14:22, 25 May 2017 (UTC)

Yes. It would be like saying "millions of water" (you would say "millions of water molecules", instead.) StuRat (talk) 14:26, 25 May 2017 (UTC)

Despite what I wrote above, I agree that the word data is normally regarded as a mass noun these days, and the logic of its plural origin has been forgotten. Dbfirs 11:06, 26 May 2017 (UTC)

Thank you all very much! By the way: Do you say that – "thank you all"?--Erdic (talk) 02:51, 27 May 2017 (UTC)

Yes. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 07:26, 27 May 2017 (UTC)

Well, then thank you, too! ;-)--Erdic (talk) 18:50, 27 May 2017 (UTC)