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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 February 2009
1 Cit. OED (1989) s.v. datum 3 ¶. From the same source it also emerges that the first attested appearance of this barbarism is in 1807, in Washington Irving's Salmagundi. Irving's education was fragmentary and his knowledge of Latin superficial (Dict. Amer. Biog. ix.506), so that this was probably not a printer's error. However, in the Paris ed. of 1824, revised by Irving himself, ‘a data’ has been corrected to ‘datum’ (the phase is still a rather odd one), so he evidently saw, or was shown, the light, o si sic omnes.