You may remember my post from a little while ago about our poor old Australian Broadcasting Corporation suddenly being unable to work out the difference between plural and singular nouns. Well, their latest SCOSE report includes a section that seems to suggest they’re still struggling to understand it …<\/p>\n
\u2018A group of young Aboriginal leaders from Central Australia is calling for an apology after it was asked to leave a backpackers resort in Alice Springs at the weekend.\u2019 <\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n
Treating the Aboriginal leaders as a single entity is faintly ridiculous. Anyway, the head of the subject phrase is \u2018<\/strong>leaders\u2019, not \u2018group\u2019. So it\u2019s better to say:<\/span><\/p>\n
A group of young Aboriginal leaders from Central Australia are<\/strong> calling for an apology after they were <\/strong>asked to leave…<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
Again, Aunty appears to be saying that the subject in the first version is the ‘leaders’ and therefore\u00a0it should be treated as a plural. But the word ‘group’ modifies it, making it singular. Though, in this case you could have used the plural in the second half of the sentence if you’d wanted to:”A group of young Aboriginal leaders from Central Australia is<\/span> calling for an apology after they were<\/span> asked to leave a backpackers resort in\u00a0Alice Springs\u00a0at the weekend.”<\/span>\u00a0No, that’s not clumsy, it’s quite legal.<\/p>\n
UPDATE:<\/p>\n
I am getting sick and tired of hearing this misuse of singular and plurals. This one tonight on Channel 7 …<\/p>\n
“The Chinese government are funding \u2026”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
ARGH!!! Freakin’ idiots!!!! The word “government” is singular. You should be saying …<\/p>\n
“The Chinese government IS funding \u2026”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
For god’s sake you morons, it’s not difficult!!<\/p>\n
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You may remember my post from a little while ago about our poor old Australian Broadcasting Corporation suddenly being unable to work out the difference between plural and singular nouns. Well, their latest SCOSE report includes a section that seems to suggest they’re still struggling to understand it … \u2018A group of young Aboriginal leaders […]<\/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":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/english.october.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6"}],"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=6"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/english.october.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":58,"href":"https:\/\/english.october.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6\/revisions\/58"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/english.october.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/english.october.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/english.october.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}