A columnist for the Gannett News Service filed a feature story a few years ago about a newlywed bride. The young lady had decorated the couple’s first home:

“Jennifer painted the bedroom dressers a glamorous silver shade. ... Finally she painted the accent trim a celery hue. Viola!”

Question: Why don’t writers who write for English-speaking readers stick to English?

Answer: Because they rightly suppose that an occasional foreign word or phrase, aptly employed, can enliven their otherwise pedestrian prose.

The theory is sound, but everything hangs on the “aptly employed.” Look at that inapt “Viola.” Instead of a sigh of Gallic satisfaction, the columnist gave us either (1) a kind of pansy or (2) a stringed instrument larger than a violin but smaller than a cello. Or “Viola” may have been dear Jenn’s maid of honor. Whatever. The effect was lost and the columnist looked silly.

Spelling, as such, is merely the first problem with foreign words. There’s also those pesky diacritical marks. Our distant cousins love them. The Germans can scarcely grunt without an umlaut, the French love their pointy little accents, and the Spanish couldn’t get through “Carmen” without a tilde or a bang mark, especially an upside-down one. At the level of The New York Times, the electronic typesetters can cope with these eccentricities, except for the Scandinavian ones. Down on the lower slopes of Olympus, most editors just Americanize the spelling.

One more word before moving on: Last summer a feature writer for The Washington Post discoursed upon foreign travel by air. “Some passengers,” he wrote, “are finding seats in the front of the plane for prices that should have landed them back with the hoi polloi.”

Aaaarghh! Gentle reader, if you ever are tempted to write of the hoi polloi, lie down, I beg you, until the temptation goes away. The Greek “hoi,” I am reliably informed, serves as an article adjective. To write of “the” hoi polloi is to write of “the the” polloi, and an amazing crowd of polloi will telephone to set you straight.

Now, about “datum” and “data.” The best advice from professional editors is to forget about “datum” altogether. The Times calls the singular noun “stilted and deservedly obscure.” Bye-bye! As for “data,” it has become one of those androgynous nouns, like “couple,” that exist to bedevil writers. “Data” is plural in form and singular in practice. Thus, “The data casts doubt ... The new data was unearthed ... The data is consistent with ... The poll data shows ... Jobs data indicates economy is slowing.”

Like so many points of style, the rule on “data” is not absolute. When we are writing about individual items, says the Stylebook of The Associated Press, a plural verb works just fine, e.g., “The data HAVE been carefully collected.” This exception to the rule will seldom worry a conscientious writer. Caesar, Suetonius and Ovid may be tumbling in their graves, but “the data is” goes marching on.

So much for “data.” What about “medium” and “media”? Here the usage has nicely settled down. Unlike the abandoned “datum,” the friendly “medium” finds daily employment in a dozen contexts. A medium universally IS, and the media universally ARE.

But I hold in my hand a clipping from The New York Times of April 9, 2006: In the second paragraph we find: “... the mainstream media IS desperately trying to make.” And in the sixth paragraph: “So far, the media ARE gingerly stepping into the field ...”

A perfect consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. That’s a rubric every writer must assert and every proofreader must deny.

Questions can be sent to James J. Kilpatrick at kilpatjj@aol.com.