[ SECRET POST #2548 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #2548 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

01.


__________________________________________________



02.


__________________________________________________



03.


__________________________________________________



04.


__________________________________________________



05.


__________________________________________________



06.


__________________________________________________



07.


__________________________________________________



08.


__________________________________________________



09.


__________________________________________________



10.



__________________________________________________


11.














Notes:

REMINDER: For people who needed extra time to finish for the FS Secret Santa - today's the last day to get in your gifts! Gifts go out tomorrow!

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 032 secrets from Secret Submission Post #363.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[ephemera]

Now I'm curious - I'm a British-English speaker, but my partner is from the USA, as are many of my friends and colleagues, and I've written and edited cross-nationally, and all these years later, I still keep finding odd corners of language where we don't quite match. What is unusual about the sentence "The entire team were laughing" in US-English?

[(Anonymous)]

It seems that, in general, British English treats teams teams as plural, American English treats them as singular (except in cases where you have a plural mascot - so the 49ers are good, but San Francisco is good). Americans would say the entire team WAS laughing. We would say, for instance, that the US national basketball team was very good, and that Liverpool is a good team this year (which often causes a bit of mockery when us Americans talk about football/soccer). Just one of those things.

[riddian]

British and American English treat collective nouns differently. To American English, "team" is a single entity, so the sentence would read "The entire team was laughing," in line with sentences like "One guy was laughing." British English insists that the collective noun implies that the subject is plural, so in addition to "Three guys were laughing" you also get "The entire team were laughing."

[ephemera]

Thank you - my English is so cross-atlantic-contaminated, that neither team sentence sounds more or less wrong to me!