Can someone please explain why collective nouns are increasingly being treated as plural rather than singular? And how to stop it? :-)
People used to say 'The crowd is yelling loudly', 'the team is working hard', 'the community is...', 'Telstra is jerking me around', 'Connex has advised that trains are running late' ie a group of things was treated as a collective noun and had singular verbs.
Now, most people, even on ABC and BBC radio, say 'The crowd are yelling loudly', 'the community are...', 'the team are working hard, 'Telstra are still jerking me around', 'Metro have advised that trains are still running late'.
Why the change?While I'm at it, what's with using 'If I were' instead of 'If I was...'? I've only noticed people doing it recently, but read that 'If I were' is OK if it's a hypothetical situation.
eg This forum thread http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=50929If I were controlling the language, I wouldn't want people treating collective nouns as plural cos it sounds all wrong. Ha.
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