Thursday, July 18, 2024

hoaxing to make the other side look bad

One of many reasons why "Reform is racist!" is a lie:

Sorry. If you're British or a speaker of some UK-derived form of English, it would be "Reform are racist." Most collective nouns, in British English, are grammatically plural. Ford are developing a new electric vehicle, for example. 

In US English, most collective nouns are singular, but there are exceptions, such as when the individuals in a collective are doing different things or doing things differently: The baseball team are signing autographs, for example, shows that each team member has his own way of signing an autograph. But The baseball team was killed in a bus crash shows that the team all died at once (as one), or died in the same way.



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