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I just read in the newspaper, "The family were bereaved." Isn't it was bereaved? Or has "family" become like the word "media," either singular or plural? I would think it could be written, "members of the family were bereaved."
Everywhere I look I am inundated with it. I don't mind a minor flaw here or there in writing. But, I consistently see horrific misspellings, run-on sentences, lack of paragraph structuring, incoherent themes, etc.. What makes me cringe the most is when somebody presents themself as being educated and their post looks like it was written by a third grader.
I just read in the newspaper, "The family were bereaved." Isn't it was bereaved? Or has "family" become like the word "media," either singular or plural? I would think it could be written, "members of the family were bereaved."
I just read in the newspaper, "The family were bereaved." Isn't it was bereaved? Or has "family" become like the word "media," either singular or plural? I would think it could be written, "members of the family were bereaved."
Reziac's response regarding the occurrence of a change of norms was noted. For me, I've noticed that English soccer announcers tend to use the plural form of to be/other verbs when making conjectures about the collective mindsets of teams, or about teams' injury situations. In the US, such verb usage would depend on whether or not you used the city name or the team nickname. For example: "Seattle appears ready for the Superb Owl" (Superb Owl = reference to Stephen Colbert's entertaining way of circumventing the NFL's copyright protection, heh), but "The Seahawks appear ready for the Superb Owl." Extrapolating from what I've seen, English announcers with whom I'm familiar would use the form "appear" regardless of whether they chose "Seattle" or "the Seahawks" as the subject of their sentence. Few English soccer teams are ever referred to by a Seahawks-style plural nickname; rather, you'll hear "Manchester City are dominating play" or "Sunderland are playing better since they replaced their manager" during the commentary.
I've noticed that English soccer announcers tend to use the plural form of to be/other verbs when making conjectures about the collective mindsets of teams or...
Interesting. Kind of like this poster's observation from another thread about musical groups:
I know it's two guys, but that's no better than saying, "KISS dominate" or "Aerosmith dominate." You COULD say, "Daft Punk Duo dominates..." But doesn't "Daft Punk dominate" sound odd?
When my daughter was in 3rd grade, her teacher complained that my daughter's writing was pretentious because she used words and punctuation that was more advanced than her classmates. This teacher actually discouraged my daughter from writing short stories. At that time my daughter was obsessed with writing short stories about the adventures of a dog named Zoe. When I learned about this, I demanded a conference with the teacher. In the course of my conversation with this teacher she repeatedly used the phrase "being that" instead of using the word "since" as well as saying "ax" instead of "ask." My daughter never returned to that school. We have school of choice in our county and I enrolled her in a different school district. The teacher at that school tested my daughter and discovered that she was reading and writing at the 12th grade level and it was due in large part to the books that she had read at home (a lot of Jack London) and not the instruction that she had received in school. Our public schools are a disgrace but I believe that they are accomplishing their agenda which is to create a populace that is easily led and easily lied to.
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