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BlindMellon

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Apr 4, 2011
1,022
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Drives me crazy when people say "Apple are....." (as in: Apple are the best company...)

So, what's up with that? Grammatically correct or not is sounds stupid as hell.

So, which way is correct?
 
It would be Apple is.... Apple is one body. There are not multiple Apples, it would then be Apples are...
 
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Depends on where you come from. In the US it's customary to view a company as a single unit, hence "Apple is.". In the UK a company is a collection of people - "Apple are."
 
Depends on where you come from. In the US it's customary to view a company as a single unit, hence "Apple is.". In the UK a company is a collection of people - "Apple are."

Exactly. Usage is different in US/UK. You will get used to it.
 
In America we refer to companies in the nomintive singular, but we're not too consistent about it.

Apple is a good company.

They have a lot of money.

It is in their best interest to release the iPhone 5.
 
If referring to them as "Apple", then I'd use singular but if I'm referring to the company otherwise, I would use "They are" instead of "It is" and "They have" instead of "It has".
 
Apple, like any company, is a collective noun, so in American English we use the singular verb conjugation.

It's the same reason we say, "the army is there; the sand is white; the water is warm."

As others have pointed out, British and Australian usage tends to conjugate for the plural usage, but I'm not sure they do so with other collective nouns so it could be an inconsistency with British English.
 
Apple, like any company, is a collective noun, so in American English we use the singular verb conjugation.

It's the same reason we say, "the army is there; the sand is white; the water is warm."

As others have pointed out, British and Australian usage tends to conjugate for the plural usage, but I'm not sure they do so with other collective nouns so it could be an inconsistency with British English.

Would would a British/Australian word this sentence:
The group of teachers (was/were) on a field trip with (its/their) students.

In America we would probably use was/their, although some of us know that it should be singular both times.
 
Same here. It depends on who you're referring to, the company or people in it. Isn't English a pain?

In America, 'they have' is simply grammatically incorrect. I sometimes use it mistakenly, but you shouldn't use a pural pronoun to replace a singular noun.

I actually think that feminists brought about this language change(because English was a male-biased language with phrases such as one man one vote, every man for himself et. c), though I could be wrong.
 
Why move to the wasteland? Its a legitimate question from the OP with legitimate answers by the posters.

+1. It's a question asked fairly often in internationally attended forums.

Likewise, sometimes someone overseas will object to "I could care less", which is a common American idiom along the same opposite-meaning vein as "Yeah, right."

It's all good.
 
Drives me crazy when people say "Apple are....." (as in: Apple are the best company...)

So, what's up with that? Grammatically correct or not is sounds stupid as hell.

So, which way is correct?

your post is the first time I have ever heard "Apple are"
 
In America, 'they have' is simply grammatically incorrect. I sometimes use it mistakenly, but you shouldn't use a pural pronoun to replace a singular noun.

I actually think that feminists brought about this language change(because English was a male-biased language with phrases such as one man one vote, every man for himself et. c), though I could be wrong.
That's the thing though, language is an ever evolving thing. Set rules can be made but they won't/don't last for long.
 
That's the thing though, language is an ever evolving thing. Set rules can be made but they won't/don't last for long.

That's true with vocab, as well; I'd never heard of the word albeit, before I started viewing these forums.

We usually say what sounds right:

twenty - twelve sounds right (and so does 2011);
but, twenty - thirteen sounds too clunky (forced), IMO; and I'll call it two thousand and thirteen.

You wouldn't say: twenty - oh - nine; but you would say nineteen - oh - nine.

We say what we heard around us -usually what we hear from childbirth.
 
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Would would a British/Australian word this sentence:
The group of teachers (was/were) on a field trip with (its/their) students.

In America we would probably use was/their, although some of us know that it should be singular both times.

Indeed, but prepositional phrases have a tendency to cause confusion.

I wonder if we modified the sentence the same result would occur?

The group (was/were) on a field trip with (its/their) peers.

I think a lot of people would find this second sentence easier to conjugate because there are fewer nouns near the subject, making it easier to figure out what the subject really is.

Then again, no one couples Apple with a prepositional phrase, and yet it still produces some difficulty (apparently).

That's the thing though, language is an ever evolving thing. Set rules can be made but they won't/don't last for long.

Some rules persist and aren't really that malleable.

For example, definitions of words change constantly. This is almost a necessity with the way life changes. However, the same cannot be said for how we classify nouns. We have to decide if something is singular or plural and stick to it because repeat deviations would make it harder and harder to figure out what was going on. Even if people are sloppy and lazy with conjugation, the end result would only be an inconsistent language, not a gradually evolved new one.

Indeed, even though spelling and definitions have changed continuously, the way we count nouns really hasn't. It's too much of a fundamental piece of syntax to casually change.
 
Doesn't phase me a bit. I'm an American that was taught UK English in primary school. I flip between the two with ease and annoyance to others around me.
 
I float between them, but it's usually "Apple are". Americans have done weird stuff to the English language. IMO, the spelling of "colour" as "color", and "centre" as "center" looks really lazy.

It also drives me up the wall when people imply that Obama is a socialist, and act like that's the worst thing that the world has ever seen.
 
I float between them, but it's usually "Apple are". Americans have done weird stuff to the English language.

I think it's fair if I ask:

Do you say, "The army is near" or "The army are near." ?

If you say, "is," how do you reconcile the difference?

What about rice, sand, or fabric?
 
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