Data
Data
[Cueball reading off a smart phone to someone off-screen.] Cueball: According to this polling data, after Kirk and Picard, the most popular Star Trek character are Data. Off-screen voice: Augh! [Caption below the frame:] Annoy grammar pedants on all sides by making "data" singular except when referring to the android.

"Kirk vs. Picard" is a debate that many Star Trek fans engage in — specifically which was a better captain of the starship Enterprise on the TV show. Captain James T. Kirk and Jean-Luc Picard each were captains of the ship in different periods (Kirk was captain of USS Enterprise (NCC-1701) in The Original Series , while Picard was captain of USS Enterprise -D (NCC-1701-D) in The Next Generation ), but fans argue over who was the "best". Most third-place candidates are pretty distant, resulting in a more multi-faceted debate. Cueball seems to be looking at results of polling for this third most popular character.
The humor in this comic stems from the fact that the Latin word data is a plural form of the word datum ‘a piece of information’, and that originally English followed Latin's lead and treated data as plural. However, in more recent English, usage of datum has faded to the extent that data is treated as a collective noun . This usage is becoming increasingly (but not universally) accepted as grammatically correct — the Wall Street Journal , for instance, recently announced that it is moving away from saying "data are," while the New York Times' manual of style allows for both variants depending on usage scenario; USA Today , however, is consistently using data as a plural ("data are"). Naturally, the purists insist on the form that is correct from the Latin grammar point of view and see "data is" as an example of a subject-verb agreement error. This type of "error" is present in the beginning of the sentence that Cueball is citing ("According to this polling data," while certain traditionalists would hold that the grammatically correct variant would be "According to these polling data").
The second error in the same sentence is due to the fact that Data is a character from Star Trek: The Next Generation. Since it is a character's name, when used to refer to the character, "Data" should always be treated as singular.
By reversing the verb agreement in both cases, Cueball is going out of his way to annoy grammatically obsessed people.
The title text suggests the mocking of language pedants/amateur grammar Nazis by hypercorrecting one's use of language. The sentence itself is an example of this:
This comic complements two of the My Hobbies comics 326: Effect an Effect (which discusses the trolling of amateur grammar Nazis) and 1405: Meteor (which mocks pedantry). This comic could also just as well have been labelled as one of Randall's Hobbies.
This comic also appears to be an example of self-irony as the author himself has previously exhibited certain inclination to insist on grammatically strict mode of usage of words loaned from Latin. One such example is the fact that xkcd's online discussion forums are called fora , which is a correct plural nominative form of forum in Latin.
[Cueball reading off a smart phone to someone off-screen.] Cueball: According to this polling data, after Kirk and Picard, the most popular Star Trek character are Data. Off-screen voice: Augh! [Caption below the frame:] Annoy grammar pedants on all sides by making "data" singular except when referring to the android.
