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Subject:Re: Collective nouns revisited From:"Wilcox, John (Contractor)" <wilcoxj -at- WDNI -dot- COM> Date:Wed, 18 Jun 1997 09:13:00 -0700
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From: A. J. Fite
To: TECHWR-L -at- LISTSERV -dot- OKSTATE -dot- EDU
My question: is a company name a collective noun? In other words, would
it
be appropriate for speakers of British English to say "IBM are" or
"Microsoft were?"
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Whenever you refer to a group AS A WHOLE you need to use a singular form
of a verb. Thus, for your first example,
IBM is the maker of an operating system better than Windows.
Microsoft isn't.
As for your second example, were can be singular (future conditional).
Thus,
If Microsoft were really concerned with quality, it would redo Word
from the ground up and get rid of all the bugs.
Regards,
John Wilcox, Documentation Specialist
Timberlands Information Services
Weyerhaeuser, WWC 2E2
Tacoma, WA 98477-0001 USA
253-924-7972 wilcoxj -at- wdni -dot- com
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