watervole | UK/US English

Yes, there is a difference (discussed in Pinker's The Language Instinct, as well as presumably lots of other places). In UK English, you can use the singular or the plural, depending on whether you want to emphasise the group as a unit or as a collection of people. I'm pretty sure that in US English you have to count an organisation as a singular entity.

Which country has three Ms in Amendment?
:P

Most UK newspapers and magazines class the word "committee" as singular in their house styles. They also, for example, put company names as singular but oddly some national newspapers treat football team names as plural - so "Manchester United are..." rather than "Manchester United is..."

As to the second one, "none" is an abbreviation of "not one" and thus should be singular.

Heh, the English responses seem pretty evenly divided so far!

My rule is that when talking about the committee as an entity, it takes the singular. But when [the members of] is implied, as in "none of the team" then the verb should be plural.

Conversely, the committee members were in favour of the amendment, but the team [as a whole] was correctly dressed.

As I now live in the UK, I tend to embrace the plural verb where I can, because it's fun and many people do it. But the gentleman who commented above is correct: in American English, a group is counted as a single entity for grammatical purposes, for example:

UK English: Tesco have lemurs on sale this week!
US English: Tesco has lemurs on sale this week!

Just about every UK magazine and newspaper would disagree with you on this and class Tesco as singular.

Following up my previous comment, this is from today's Times web site:

Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) today revealed that the value of its assets has fallen by £6.1 billion this year as it "regretfully" laid out plans to raise £19.7 billion to prop up its balance sheet.

RBS hopes to raise £15 billion through offering new ordinary shares to investors at 65.5p each, above today's share price, which fell slightly to 64.8p.

And this from today's Guardian web site:

Marks & Spencer has reassured investors that it has no plans to slash its dividend despite reporting first-half profits down by more than 30%.

If they have lemurs on sale this week I must get me down there and buy me some (she said, mangling grammar horrifically)

I regard the first point as a house style question. The second is grammatical, though.

That's an interesting point on 'none' - I would generally regard it as referring to a plural because you're referring to multiple members of the team but the contraction does suggest otherwise. I do think 'were' sounds better though. :)

I love it when strange little things like that come up and make you think about language. Like 'firth' being a variation on 'fjord'.

'None' is not always a contraction of 'not one' -- sometimes it's 'not any', eg. 'it's none of your business'.

Even when it is 'not one', a singular verb wouldn't be used in eg. 'none of the players was correctly dressed'.

'Were' sounds better because it is better, and vice versa ;-)

I answered the second one as if it were the same sort of question as the first (that is, concentrating on 'team' rather than 'none') because (a)that's what I was thinking about at the time and (b)that's what I thought

watervole was asking about. With hindsight, this may have been confusing...

The one in which my shoulder hurts and I don't know how to edit a poll. If it was in the LJ text I'd already have fixed it.

C'est la vie.

Ah! I always wondered where 'firth' derived from. Now I shall have no trouble remembering what a firth is.

I'm with you. The first is a matter of where to place the emphasis, on individuals or the unit. The second you can test by removing the clause (of the team). It's still not crystal clear, but "None were" seems more correct, because none does seem to be obviously plural so takes a plural verb.

I just woke up so I can't actually prove that you wouldn't use "none" if you only had one guy there. I'm working on it, but right now I only have half my brain.

Only if your definition of 'better' does not include being grammatically correct

Bring back the teaching of grammar, for goodness sake:

1) Committee is a singular collective noun, so a committee is or is not. 'Committees' is the plural noun, so 'Most committees are a waste of time' is both factually and grammatically correct.

2) The team is another singular collective noun, and each of its members is a singular noun, so 'none [no-one] of the team' is/was'. If you want to go plural, then 'Team-members were'...

As a magazine editor, I have memories of media-studies graduates who really did not understand why I got all pedantic about something I called a 'verb' being required in between the Capital at the beginning of a sentence and its full stop.

No, it has nothing to do with differences between UK and US English. The difference is between grammatical and ungrammatical English.

And yet a quick google reveals several pages advising that either can be used, including from Oxford Dictionaries (http://www.askoxford.com/asktheexperts/faq/aboutgrammar/pluralverbs?view=uk) and BBC Learning English (http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/grammarchallenge/pdfs/gc_48_subject_verb.pdf) (pdf document). A house style may prefer one of the two options, of course.

I'm well aware that the pedantic approach is to treat committee as a singular noun. However, the way the words are actually used in the wild suggests that many people recognise that a noun can be singular and can also be a collective noun - hence can be treated as plural in cases where this makes better sense.

eg. The team was losing. The team were in disagreement about the best tactics.

I can be very pedantic about many aspects of grammar, especially punctuation where meaning is lost by bad punctuation. However, I feel that split infinitives, double negatives and singular/plural collective nouns have a role to play.

Thanks for the links. Interesting reading. I'm glad to see that my instinct is in fact correct.

I'm still pondering over which is correct with the second but I'm sure of the first.

Granted.. I grew up mainly in the US and am soon switching from German to UK nationality..... so if it's a matter of language differences that might explain my confusion.

I learned that it was, 'was' as long as it was one subject (inc. a group).

You may feel so, but eg my COD (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concise_Oxford_Dictionary) and ODWE (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_dictionary_for_writers_and_editors) think it's just a usage style preference.

This is what really irks me; when people get pedantic about the silliest "rules", but miss the big picture about what's valuable and worth fighting for in our language.

Steven Fry has a directly apposite passage in his latest blog post (http://www.stephenfry.com/blog/?p=64):
"When asked to join in a “let’s persuade this supermarket chain to get rid of their ‘five items or less’ sign” I never join in. Yes, I am aware of the technical distinction between ‘less’ and ‘fewer’, and between ‘uninterested’ and ‘disinterested’ and ‘infer’ and ‘imply’, but none of these are of importance to me. ‘None of these are of importance,’ I wrote there, you’ll notice – the old pedantic me would have insisted on “none of them is of importance”. Well I’m glad to say I’ve outgrown that silly approach to language."

I'm trying to distinguish between what people have been taught (which isn't always correct in any case) and what they actually instinctively use.

If you say "the team was all dressed in red", does it really sound better than "the team were all dressed in red"?

But if you say that the team was victorious, then it makes sense. The correct use is in fact context-dependent.

Hurrah!

On the contrary; "none" is singular, because as

steverogerson observes it is a contraction of "not one". Not one of the team was correctly dressed.

I.. honestly can't remember if I ever learned this in class. I think it genuinely might be one of those things which I missed through switching between so many schools and school systems.

I answered the first question instinctively but I would probably be more likely to say, "None of the team were correctly dressed" and believe it was grammatically correct like that.

:) That made me smile.

How about 'Some of the team'? I think 'none' might be confusing the issue a bit.

*nods* Naturally, I would always use 'was' there.

I did answer the poll with 'none of the team was correctly dressed' and I realize that if I feel 'some of the team was...' is correct, it should apply to 'none' as well but if I'm speaking rather than writing and don't think about it, I'd still probably go with 'none of the team were'. :/

The committee is acting as a single unit, so "was" is appropriate.
"None" means "no one", which is singular, so one is appropriate there as well. And you misspelled amendment. Not sure whether to classify myself as American or British, as I am currently both.

This does not deal with what happens when you have two or more committees that are not in agreement (sorry, Ive just been writing up committee minutes...)

Uh oh! I didn't read the text following the poll until after I had voted!

As a trained and experienced US editor, I would use "was" in both cases if working in a professional capacity on a US English MS.

As a committed Anglophile, when operating in a nonprofessional setting, I tend to use the plural verb with collective nouns just to be difficult and mess with my fellow Americans' heads. :-)

There's a deal of waffle in both countries as to whether to treat 'none' as = 'not one' (and therefore always singular). I find that rather affected and tend not to do so.

Actually I'm dithering about the first question. I regard both cases as singular, but "The committee were ..." is tempting.

My rule is that when talking about the committee as an entity, it takes the singular. But when [the members of] is implied, as in "none of the team" then the verb should be plural.

Yes, exactly. A good distinction.

We had this argument about e.g. "(team name) are my dream team" versus "is my dream team". It seems to be 'are' if it means the current team, i.e. the players they field at the moment; with 'is' it means the club regardless of who they have playing for them.

Can I recommend 'The Stories of English' by David Crystal as well worth reading and as a convincing and well-researched explanation of both

*why this kind of question doesn't really matter; and
*why people will always argue strongly that it does! (Ever since the eighteenth century, that is).

English comes in a huge variety of forms and which one is 'correct' in a particular circumstance is, ultimately, the form that is currently being used by most people in whichever group is being addressed. Whether we like it or not!

As for 'none' the online etymology has the following:
O.E. nan "not one, not any," from ne "not" (see no) + an "one." Cognate with O.S., M.L.G. nen, O.N. neinn, M.Du., Du. neen, O.H.G., Ger. nein "no," and analogous to L. non- (see non-). As an adj., since c.1600 reduced to no except in a few archaic phrases, especially before vowels, such as none other, none the worse.

(G,D,AR)

It only occurred to me when I visited one of the local 'towns', Olafsfjöður - pronounced Oh lah(f)s fjirther. It seems to depend partly upon the local accent, but here in northern Iceland the ö in this case is pronounced more like the Scots 'i'.

I love the icon!

Dual nationals were excluded from answering this question but I did anyway (once as each).

Inspired by Journey Planet 2?

Yes, it was. Though the writer seems to have it different from most of the feedback I'm getting.

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