Sunday, April 20, 2014

Verbs used with collective nouns

"The Family have washed their hands of him." This is a sentence from a P. G. Wodehouse novel, and it demonstrates the formal British usage of plural verbs with collective nouns, something that is hardly ever done in American English today. We view the collective nouns as singular entities, and thus would say, "The Family has,", not, "The Family have."

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