[Magdalen] Creeping UK-ism?

[James Oppenheimer-Crawford]

I'm going to assume you believe corporations are people too ? ? ?

1. The team has arrived.  All of it has arrived. [nah. I don't think so.]

2. The team have arrived. All of them have arrived. [sounds better]

You think the team is an entity and I think of them as a collection of
people.

I would not say someone ought to use one form or the other.  I dare say
we'll understand both forms, so it really is drivial. To say we ought to
speak a certain way cannot be argued, "Just because." It has to be backed
up with a reason why one use is actually unclear. If it's not unclear, then
it's silly nonsense to bother oneself and others.  Do what you will and
leave the rest be.

By the way, your mom's wrong. The word "ain't" most definitely IS a word,
and has been in popular use even among British upper class since the
eighteen-hundreds. It's very clear.  It fills a real niche by making
certain constructions easier to say.  It is no way going away (as long as
there is an English language anyways).

I'm not a linguistic psychologist, but I am guessing that the pluraling of
the word Team stems from complex sentences in which a pronoun was later
substituted for Team, perhaps multiple times.  The obvious grammatical
choice would have to be "it", and as you observe in your own experience,
that just sounds very wrong.

I'd say the people have spokened.

However, I have yet to see a single post here (except from me) regarding
Febyuary and libarian.  (Perhaps we need a new thread for that?  Nah.
Nobody ever, ever cares about Febyuary and libarian.)


James W. Oppenheimer-Crawford
*“A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved,
except in memory. LLAP**”  -- *Leonard Nimoy

On Sun, Jul 26, 2015 at 4:38 PM, Sibyl Smirl <polycarpa3 at ckt.net> wrote:

> On 7/26/15 3:06 PM, James Oppenheimer-Crawford wrote:
>
>> If it makes better sense, I think that's it.  And it certainly does make
>> better sense.
>> Grammar only is an effort to explain what we're doing.  We drive grammar;
>> it doesn't drive us.
>>
>
> I'm not sure that it makes "better" sense: a team, after all, _is_ just
> _one_ "thing".  So is an army, for another instance.  If the team wins, the
> whole thing wins, not just one or several of them.  Even the bench-warmers
> are part of the team, and part of the win.  There are lines of reasoning
> that go both ways: America and England chose different lines for the
> grammar.  But _everybody_ around me used it when I was a child, and we
> didn't get BBC radio here, then, and saw/heard damn few British movies.
> What jars on the ear is what does not sound "right" to you, not what you
> learned in school.
>
> I remember what effort my mom put in trying to get me to say "Am I not..."
> which just felt wrong to me, excruciatingly formal, even though she was of
> course correct.  "Aren't I.." seemed to feel all correct to a lot of people
> around me, but I knew the reasoning why _that_ was wrong.  I was told
> enough times that "Ain't I..." was wrong (Mom always said, "There ain't so
> such word as 'ain't'") that that always jarred my ear, too.  So I didn't
> really know _what_ to say.
>
> But that itchy ear of mine does American English, not the Queen's.  I am
> an American.
>
>
>
> --
> Sibyl Smirl
> I will take no bull from your house!  Psalms 50:9a
> mailto:polycarpa3 at ckt.net
>