english

[totient]

What a strange language.

I just wrote the following sentence in email:

"The Sapphire and Gray colors are also nice, but wouldn't work as well with the gold colored ring that Hodges uses in their rosettes."

Notice that "Hodges" (a company) is singular for verb agreement, but plural for pronoun substitution. I could have written "Hodges use" but on this side of the Atlantic that's considered a stuffy British archaism. I could have written "its rosettes". But I don't think it's just my ideolect that prefers the plural pronoun for companies. And it's not because the gender of "Hodges" is unknown. Though perhaps this is the source of the increasingly common use of "their" as a gender-ambiguous singular pronoun.

Comments

[drbitch.livejournal.com]

As you noted, American and British rules for collective nouns are different to start with and currently in flux. I remember how odd it sounded to me when I first started listening to the BBC and hearing things like "Manchester United are winning", not to mention "but we expect that to change in future as their star player is in hospital."

American English treats almost all collective nouns as singular, with "the police" being one of the few exceptions I can think of. Mixing singular verb use for collective nouns with plural pronouns is apparently also an Americanism, according to this page (http://www.learnenglish.org.uk/grammar/archive/collective_nouns.html).