To tell teacher friend about grammar error?

[ImaSababa]

A friend of mine is a primary school teacher, and is making and selling cushions on Facebook. Lovely. The problem is, they're riddled with mistakes, such as "Christmas at the Johnson's" when surely is should be "Johnsons'".

Should I tell her?

If you don't like that, get round it with Colleagues on the project team are happy...

or just stop making unnecessary rules, and accept that "the project team are happy to help you..." is perfectly fine to the ears of British speakers (I think US speakers might differ).

I find it genuinely tricky. My modern linguist brain wants it to be 'The team is...', but normal usage definitely favours 'are'. In the case of using a team name, like Arsenal, I'd definitely tip in favour of the plural. It sounds actively weird to say 'Arsenal is going to play on Saturday'.

It's another thing which causes trouble when teaching foreign languages to native English speakers. They're constantly trying to say things like 'The police are...' or 'The government are...'. The singular noun with a plural verb sounds so wrong in other languages!

The trouble is, being happy with performance is an emotion and you can't really ascribe feelings to a collective noun like team. Team describes a strategic unit within a sport. I think we should never have got used to such an expression. However, 'the guys were happy' would have been better.
To say 'The house rejects the PM's proposal' is ok, because 'rejection' refers to the result of a vote. It refers to a process rather than feelings. It's funny, you wouldn't say the battalion was annoyed or elated. You'd think of the men or the leader, but it's almost too big a unit to be having collective feelings ascribed to it.

The trouble is, being happy with performance is an emotion and you can't really ascribe feelings to a collective noun like team

I'm not so sure about that. What about 'a happy family' or a country being unhappy with its government's leadership? In any case, my example about the team being happy was an arbitrary one. We can ditch the emotional angle and go for 'The team was winning 3-1' or 'The team were winning 3-1".

'The team was winning', I suppose. We don't ever say ' The country is unhappy with the government' . For a start, the whole population is never going to be because voting results are never unanimous. Even on matters of national interest there is divergence.

I think many of these examples of usage are slang and should never have been allowed to take hold, anyway. People should have got into the habit of asking "Don't you mean the players were happy with their performance?" - fifty years ago.
Somehow, 'Arsenal was winning 2 - 0' sounds wrong. ( 'Germany was winning the trade war' sounds right. But you think of the big , singular land mass first when you think of a country) Arsenal as a commodity doesn't seem to have a singular identity because it's an amorphous sort of label or idea, and every aspect of football is about multitude - of fans, of players, of attendees, except for the ground itself.

Perhaps, just as a gerund can be a bit of both, so a team can be a kind of abstract noun as well as a collective one.

No, don’t tell her. You’ll just end up as the bad guy!

We don't ever say ' The country is unhappy with the government' . For a start, the whole population is never going to be because voting results are never unanimous. Even on matters of national interest there is divergence.

Yes we do - people make generalisations all the time. It's not about whether what they're saying is true, it's about how they express it! People absolutely would say things like "The country is up in arms about this' etc.

I wouldn't describe a sentence like 'The government are introducing new laws' as slang really. It's just a fairly standard way of expressing things in spoken English.

You can't stop language from changing by getting in the habit of saying "Don't you mean ?" It really doesn't work like that.

You seem very preoccupied with the number, nature, size and philosophical state or emotional capacity of the plural entities within your collective nouns. I think all of that is pretty irrelevant to the grammar tbh. It's just become common usage in English to use a plural verb with a singular collective noun. Simple as that.

I think it is hilarious that admin have had to delete posts on a thread about an apostrophe

@TwylaSands..

That should be “...that admin HAS had to delete posts...”

I love grammar. Fuck me, the way the country’s going, it’s all the stability to which I can cling.

(Things are bad, but they’ll never be so bad that I have to ram a preposition to the end of a sentence)

Piglet89

Things are bad, but they’ll never be so bad that I have to ram a preposition to the end of a sentence.

Absolutely. That's the kind of thing up with which I will not put.

just stop making unnecessary rules

woah @Daddaddad that's fighting talk!

If we take emotion or plurals out of it, would people really be happy with "the team are based in room 24"?

It has to be "The team is based in room 24", surely?

What about staff? 'The team' is often an inclusive way of saying 'my staff' . 'The staff is/ are based in Room 24'. It should be ' members of staff' I guess.

Should it be Room 24 with a capital letter?

Philosophically speaking, when will it be ok for common usage to dictate that 'chester drawers' is ok, just as numerous pubs with Latin names had the pronunciation of these corrupted over time to something English-sounding, and usually something to do with homely, ordinary things.

Does common usage only achieve legitimacy in certain instances?

@TwylaSands

I think it is hilarious that admin have had to delete posts on a thread about an apostrophe

I’d pay good money to read those. 🤭

@Piglet89

I love grammar. Fuck me, the way the country’s going, it’s all the stability to which I can cling.

(Things are bad, but they’ll never be so bad that I have to ram a preposition to the end of a sentence)

Hmm... staff is an interesting one. I've just looked it up in my dictionary, which says it's a noun which is 'treated as singular or plural'. I'd definitely say 'the staff are sitting in the staff room', not 'is'. I suppose if you were imagining the staff as a body... No, to me 'staff' definitely feels like a plural noun referring to multiple people, as opposed to words like 'government' or 'team' referring to a single unit made up of multiple people. Of course you can say 'members of staff' instead, but that's rather avoiding the issue, because it's not incorrect to use 'staff' in that context rather than 'members of staff', so one needs to be able to know which form of the verb to use with it!

If we take emotion or plurals out of it, would people really be happy with "the team are based in room 24"? It has to be "The team is based in room 24", surely?

I don't know! . It should be 'the team is' really. But I think I'd happily say 'The team are based'. I'm a keen grammarian, but not to the extent of rejecting normal usage. Of course the line between error, slang, colloquial usage and standard usage is always debatable. I usually try to tread a line somewhere between 'a shade more grammatically accurate than your average speaker' and 'sounds like a pedantic twat'.

Doesn't matter if it is correct or not. It makes no difference to selling the cushions. The fact you mention she is a teacher implies you want to make a point. Why is it important to you?

Doesn't matter if it is correct or not. It makes no difference to selling the cushions.

Of course it does! Plenty of people wouldn't buy something with a mistake on it. I certainly wouldn't.

When does common usage trump rules and become accepted?

@ClareBlue

Doesn't matter if it is correct or not. It makes no difference to selling the cushions. The fact you mention she is a teacher implies you want to make a point. Why is it important to you?

Of course it matters that it is correct. It also makes a difference to selling the cushions -fewer people will buy them with mistakes on them. Of course a point is being made that she is a teacher. It’s important because the OP wants to help her friend and also help her avoid looking ignorant and uneducated.

I have been trying to stay away from this thread and as a result haven’t RTFT.

My opinion is that the (I think common) American (US) usage would be helpful: the Johnson house.

That's a good question, ClareBlue, but I don't think it's one that applies to the OP's example. Ditching apostrophes could become normal common usage in time, but using an apostrophe but putting it in the place where it should be for a singular rather than a plural possessive isn't an example of any specific, consistent, common usage. It's a mistake.

*I have been trying to stay away from this thread and as a result haven’t RTFT.
My opinion is that the (I think common) American (US) usage would be helpful: the Johnson house. *

No flaming from me. No idea if that's common American usage. I don't see how it's helpful though. The phrase At the Johnsons' remains common UK English usage, whether people understand where to put the apostrophe or not. They're not going to stop using it. It's not that we can't avoid it in normal British English anyway - anyone can write at the Johnson family's house, if they're traumatised by plural/singular apostrophe choice. Actually let's face it - most people are probably blithely unaware of (or don't give two hoots about) the apostrophe problem anyway!