America Comprehended: Collective nouns and singular verbs
by awindram
COLLECTIVE NOUNS AND SINGULAR VERBS: The last month, for fairly obvious World Cup-related reasons, I have been flicking through the sports pages of American newspapers more often than usual. Reading reports of World Cup games I have been reminded of one of those irritating British-English and American-English grammatical discrepancies that trips up and makes a fool of the expat on either side of the Atlantic; in this case, whether to use a singular or plural verb with a collective noun. “Brazil is losing badly to Germany,” sounds leaden and just plain wrong to me, whereas “Brazil are losing badly to Germany,” sounds perfectly natural, and is how I have always unthinkingly talked to the locals about sports teams, but presumably all this time – and assuming the average American isn’t au fait with the quirks of British-English – I have sounded ever-so-slightly moronic.
I thought a collective noun always took a singlular verb. Brazil is losing, but the Brazilians are losing. But… the sheep are. Then again, you have to be able to distinguish between one sheep and two sheep…
English is just difficult!