Multiples of Tool

(Note that this post has nothing to do with either the band or the thing I said the other day about Tool not being a band but a genetic defect... If you want to read about the band, go somewhere else!)

---

I caught myself the other day using -- in speech, and to a literate person -- a plural pronoun where a singular pronoun was most definitely called for. You know the scenario: having said something about a noun of no definite gender, wily Impatiences lures you into making its replacement by the terser single-syllable pronoun. That's well and good if the noun represents a thing; however, if it's a person, one ought arbitrarily to choose one of "he" or "she": this gives you both syntactic correctness (the grammar is right) and semantic correctness (the meaning is right given what is known so far, even though one is picking the value of an unknown with less than total certainty). One ought to go with "she" or "he" but oft instead one chooseth "their" and the consequent descent into grammatical barbarism may spell the end of the world as early as tomorrow afternoon.

All this is hardly news to the elite cadre of linguistic pedants who actually care about this stuff (NB: the swollen membership count of this vibrant academe is at least seven, worldwide) and that is why I'm stepping into the breach to fend off an even more insipid attack on the hallowed grounds of Language, an attack of which no one I know has taken any notice...

The thing that's been killing me for years (the psychological damage it inflicts multiplies daily as I learn how widespread it is) is the conjugation of verbs whose subject is singular as if that subject were a plural noun. For instance, for those riding the packed bandwagon of FIFA World Cupdom, a Sportsnet telecaster could be heard to say,

France have won their semifinal match...

France have won, have it? Well Canada haven't won anything because our team suck.

I understand where people are trying to go with this: there's more than one player on the team so they think words that denote, roughly, the same thing can be used interchangeably with "they" to mean, "all the members of the team". They can't. How many teams were in the World Cup? Many. How many teams does France constitute? One. France is one team among many teams; one group among many groups; one nation in a world full of them. The French may have lost the final in embarrassing fashion, but France haven't. It has. It makes as much sense to refer to a house in the plural because it is made up of many bricks, or a car for its many parts.

The car have come to a stop outside the house which have remained in substantially the same condition these many year.

France, through a combination of shorthand and personification for the purpose of national Romance, means "the French football team", a singular entity.

It's the same with companies, folks. Sony Corporation is a company. A company is an entity, a thing, one. That it may be comprised of employees, of creditors and equityholders and fixed and variable capital and so on changes nothing: it's still one thing. Like a quarter, whose many component cents don't make it two or four or any more than one silvery unit of coin.

The absolute kicker is that this linguistic evil is ancient, finding its way from the esteemed pen onto the esteemed tongues of the characters of no less a writer than Jane Austen. Mansfield Park is from 1814 and that's a lot of years for one didactic hairsplitter to erase. Compounding the problem are hockey teams that obligingly name themselves with plural nouns (Toronto Maple Leafs[sic! sic! sic!]) so that "have" makes sense with them, co-residing in the same league as teams with such asinine names as the Minnesota Wild. Is it one Wild, many Wild, as in One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish? If that's the case then "the Wild have beaten the Leafs[SIC, damnit]" is correct. Maybe we should ask Jack London?

The English language won't last the night at this rate! The final herald of our Doom will be some dolt screaming in the street tomorrow around noon amid quaking earth and crashing meteorite: "Oh God! The world have ended!"

---

P.S.: Media is still a plural noun, and don't EVER forget that!