CNN journalists, today, like their Fox News colleagues ten years ago, rarely use the form “job market” on the air.

From observation, not amateur impressionism, I can say that *guests* and *interviewees* on these networks, like most of us, do greatly prefer “job market.” The Google News results may also be skewed somewhat by the attributive use of “job-market” and, more importantly, by the fact that they include print journalism as well as transcripts of on-air conversation that are imperfectly reliable at the level required.

Moreover, I never suggested that the plural form had replaced the singular in English a decade ago, that it’s replaced it now, or even that it’s outstripping it in everyday use.

The recent note that generated this discussion may have been loosely phrased, but I will repeat that “jobs market” is the form preferred by CNN (and Fox News, at least up till three or four years ago, when I gave up watching it).

The correct method, however, would be to investigate actual usage on CNN (and Fox and MSNBC if you like) rather than to rely on stats from Google.

And the blithe assumption (and confident assertion) that the best explanation for the statistics is that I’m oblivious to a potential selection effect is gratuitous, to say the least.