It seems even the ‘bastion’ of good english in this country can’t quite get it right.<\/p>\n
The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (the ‘aunty’) employs\u00a0many professional writers (including scores of journalists), and to ensure they all uphold the best traditions of the english language, the ‘aunty’ also\u00a0has an internal Standing Committee on Spoken English’, affectionately and collectively called\u00a0SCOSE. Now generally, this body is a very valuable resource within the national broadcaster, and I will probably include a number of\u00a0excerpts from their reports in this blog in the future. But, alas, even SCOSE gets it wrong.<\/p>\n
In\u00a0one of their\u00a0recent bulletins to staff, SCOSE made the following comment:<\/p>\n
\u2018A group of agricultural experts believes there may be other options for farmers who might be considering leaving the land.\u2019<\/p>\n
This is another example of the same mistake. The head noun is experts <\/strong>(plural). So the verb should be plural believe<\/strong>, not singular believes<\/strong>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Sorry aunty, that’s wrong. The word ‘group’ modifies the noun ‘experts’ so that the subject\u00a0becomes a singular – in this case, a group. The test for this sort of sentence is to remove the noun that is being modified. If the sentence were to read just ‘A group believes…’ then we wouldn’t complain. But saying ‘A group believe …’ as SCOSE suggests is wrong. Without the word ‘group’ in there, SCOSE may be correct – in that case it would be ‘Experts believe…’ which would be right. But now we’re talking about a singular ‘group’, not the plural ‘experts’.<\/p>\n
The original sentence is correct, and SCOSE is wrong. Unfortunately, this is an error SCOSE has repeated in a couple of their monthly bulletins.<\/p>\n
Another example of SCOSE’s occassional misjudgement\u00a0comes from a much earlier bulletin, and deals with the possessive form of proper nouns that end in the letter ‘s’. In one report, a journalist was berated for referring (as I recall) to “Ben Cousins’ lawyer”. The journalist was told that they should have said (or written) “Ben Cousins’s lawyer”. Bzzzzt. Wrong. It has always been the case in English, that where a person’s name ends in an ‘s’ (such as ‘Cousins’), then it is INCORRECT to add another ‘s’ after the name when turning it into the possessive form. We might say “Ben’s lawyer” (because ‘Ben’ does not end in an ‘s’, so we can add a possessive ‘s’ to it),\u00a0but it is WRONG to say “Cousins’s lawyer”. Just listen to the buzzing sound it creates – CUZZ-enz-ez!!<\/p>\n
We never heard about “Jesus’s disciples”, it was always “Jesus’ disciples”.\u00a0<\/p>\n
When the name has an ‘s’ on the end and we need to turn it into the possessive form, we DO NOT add an extra ‘s’, just an apostrophe<\/strong> – as the journalist originally and correctly\u00a0did when he\/she used “Ben Cousins’ lawyer”.<\/p>\n
Admittedly, there is still something of a grey area when the name ends in an ‘s’ sound, but not necessarily in the letter – such as Louise, Prudence, or Maurice. Purists will argue that here, too, an extra ‘s’ is incorrect (that it should be “Louise’ book”, “Prudence’ teacher” and “Maurice’ lawyer”) , though support here seems to\u00a0have been\u00a0waning in recent years.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It seems even the ‘bastion’ of good english in this country can’t quite get it right. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (the ‘aunty’) employs\u00a0many professional writers (including scores of journalists), and to ensure they all uphold the best traditions of the english language, the ‘aunty’ also\u00a0has an internal Standing Committee on Spoken English’, affectionately and collectively […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[8,9],"tags":[12,13],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/english.october.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/english.october.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/english.october.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/english.october.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/english.october.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/english.october.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29,"href":"https:\/\/english.october.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4\/revisions\/29"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/english.october.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/english.october.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/english.october.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}