> Angels & Airwaves: Forty-six reverts in one hour by two editors. The point of contention? Whether "Angels & Airwaves" is a band or "Angels & Airwaves" are a band. (British English requires "are", as the band comprises multiple people, while American English requires "is", as the band is a singular entity.) ALL-CAPS edit summaries laced with profanity and death threats liberally employed by one side.
Here's a sample:
23:37, 21 February 2006 Alex 101 talk contribs 12,196 bytes +1 Reverted edits by Tykell to last version by Alex 101 - FOR THE LAST TIME, STOP AND DON'T COME BACK! undo
23:35, 21 February 2006 Alex 101 talk contribs 12,196 bytes +1 Reverted edits by Tykell to last version by Alex 101 - TYKELL, CAN YOU DO ME A FAVOR? DIE! undo
23:34, 21 February 2006 Alex 101 talk contribs 12,196 bytes +1 Reverted edits by Tykell to last version by Alex 101 - crying PLEASE STOP, PLEASE, I'M BEGGING YOU crying undo
23:33, 21 February 2006 Alex 101 talk contribs 12,196 bytes +1 Reverted edits by Tykell to last version by Alex 101 - I HAVE A GUN, I'M GOING TO SHOOT YOU NOW! shoot shoot shoot shoot shoot shoot undo
23:31, 21 February 2006 Alex 101 talk contribs 12,196 bytes +1 Reverted edits by Tykell to last version by Alex 101 - YOU REALLY HAVE TO STOP, FOR THE VERY LAST TIME, STOP OR I'LL KILL YOU! undo
23:30, 21 February 2006 Alex 101 talk contribs 12,196 bytes +1 Reverted edits by Tykell to last version by Alex 101 - I KNOW YOU DON'T WANT TO STOP, BUT YOU HAVE TO STOP undo
00:09, 23 February 2006 Tykell talk contribs 11,705 bytes -1 No, we can't. Don't you know when to quit, kid? undo
23:42, 22 February 2006 Alex 101 talk contribs 11,706 bytes +1 now that I'm unblocked and this page is unprotected we can change it undo
I think if you're all-caps screaming you've lost the argument, and seeing this I'm actually quite embarrassed for the guy. Personally I think "$band is good" or "$team is winning" does sound a bit silly, but I've seen it so many times that I'm kinda used to it. Besides I suspect the same is true for an American hearing "$band are good" or "$team are winning". Either way it definitely doesn't warrant losing your cool like this.
It sounds normal to say that an American team like Lakers/Patriots/Giants are winning while a British team like Arsenal/United/City is winning.
Whos winning? Arsenal are (team)
Whos winning? Ronnie O'Sullivan is (singular)
Disclosure: I am English.
Arsenal are winning
Arsenal is the best team in the league
It's contradictory (as well as plainly false ;) ), but that's English.
https://twitter.com/search?q=%22arsenal%20are%20the%20best%2...
Something that comprises many people is treated as singular unless it's in a plural form.
-Arsenal is a team. -We are Arsenal players.
-There are many arsenals in Britain, but there is only one Arsenal.
If it's unclear you have to add words. You have to make sure the subject is singular. With Arsenal the singular nature of the word doesn't require it.
-There are many patriots in the USA, but there is only one Patriots football team.
In your example, Arsenal is the singular team. "Arsenal players are winning" is grammatically correct but not really used because players are understood to be part of a team.
From memory NBA, NFL, MLB use pluralized names but MLS and Indy Car Racing (or whatever it is called now) doesn't?
I don't follow MLS, but looking at the team names, they mostly look singular to me, apart from "New York Red Bulls". I suspect the Red Bulls are nearly always referred to in the plural by Americans.
E.g. Jazz, Heat, Thunder
Joking aside, it might sound odd to an American (or Canadian?) but British English would not distinguish between whether or not the name or “nickname” are singular or plural. So we would say:
The Seahawks are winning
Seattle are winning
Arsenal are winning
Rangers were relegated
I think this is the kind of thing where you can learn to tolerate the “wrong” one but it’ll always sound weird to you, whether “wrong” for you is British or US English :-)
Edit: I did think of a situation where we’d use “is” - when you’re referring to the legal entity or FULL name of the club. “Aberdeen Football Club is a Scottish professional football club based in Aberdeen”. This is pretty rare to see, and you’ll likely just see it in, ironically enough, the first line of a Wikipedia page.
"The Patriots are winning" sounds OK to me as an American. "The Patriots is winning" sounds totally wrong. "Arsenal are winning" sounds fine, "Arsenal is winning" also sounds fine.
Band names tend to be mixed. It's clearly "the Red Hot Chili Peppers are playing at..." but also "Primus is playing at...". (See also the edit war between "The Eagles" and just "Eagles")
perhaps why it sounds right
In my neck of the woods at least, whether the proper noun itself is a plural word is also a major factor. I would be more likely to say, "The Beatles are a band," but, "Led Zepplein is a band."
Angels & Airwaves is a fun one, because it's two different proper nouns, but "Angels & Airwaves is a band" still sounds more correct to my (Chicago) ears. I cannot provide any plausible-sounding rationalization for this opinion, but I will fight to the death to defend it.
Just like you'd say "Wells Fargo is a bank" even though it's obviously a huge corporation that is made up of thousands of people.
In some contexts it still makes way more sense to use the plural conjugations, like if you were to say "Angels & Airwaves are playing a great show", because at that point you're talking about what they (the band members) are doing. Likewise you would say "Angels & Airwaves are putting out an album" or "are retiring" because you're talking about the actions of the band members, as opposed to the business entity (the band itself).
Sorry, I'm a musician as well as a coder, so I've thought about the syntax of this before.
Neither dialect says you have gotten to be kidding me, right?
I think it's the British that have lost the use of "gotten" in favour of "got".
American: I wrote them British: I wrote to them
Edit: Interestingly(?), the government official leaflet adds an "at": https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/coronavirus-covid...
I've never heard that construct. Are you by chance referring to Morton Salt's motto "When it rains, it pours"?
I think it was HN that lead me to the discovered not too long ago that the phrase originated from an early-20th-Century ad campaign of theirs following the introduction of magnesium carbonate, an anti-clumping agent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morton_Salt
In the US - in the Arkansas Ozarks, specifically - I've heard the other version in the same context.
* Quite means something different. In British "quite good" is similar to "particularly good". In American it's more like "OK",
* Spelling of -ing form of words ending in l. Br: travelling, Am: traveling,
* Placement of stress on multi-syllable words. It almost seems like anything British people do is the opposite in America. Br: 'adult, a'ddress, ice 'cream. Am: a'dult, 'address, 'ice cream.
The word "research" is an odd one as it's pronounced as re'search as both verb and noun in BrE but 'research as both verb and noun in AmE.
But, of course, many British speakers now use the American way without realising (as evidenced by replies to my original comment).
If you're very posh then yes, but everyone else now uses the American sense. If you asked me what I thought of a TV show, "quite good" means I enjoyed it but I'm not that fussed if I don't happen to watch any more of it.
I think there is possibly a big difference between spoken and written language here. Would you really use "quite good" in that sense while speaking? I don't think so. I think British people would "meh, it's OK".
He's definitely a bit posh.
Humour aside, I don't think he's posh enough to use it in the intensifier sense. If he says something is "quite good" on TV I'd expect it to mean "good" but not necessarily "better than good". Would be interested to see your counter example if you do remember it.
Not really, it means something more like 'fairly' or 'reasonably' good.
And if you preface it with 'really', it doesn't mean you're not lying, it makes it more like 'bloody' good. (With possible implication that this was unexpected, again depending on intonation.)
I hear this quite a lot. In my experience we (Brits) use it mostly in your second sense, to moderate statements. We use it as an intensifier more rarely and usually in specific phrases: "quite right", "quite the ...". I believe the key difference is that we use the word with greater frequency than Americans. GLOWBE [1] is an excellent resource for checking such hunches if you are interested.
The more important thing, I think, is that Americans don't understand the first sense at all. You have to say "pretty good" or something to have the same effect.
Wikipedia seems to be more in line with my experience, too:
> In AmE the word quite used as a qualifier is generally a reinforcement, though it is somewhat uncommon in actual colloquial American use today and carries an air of formality: for example, "I'm quite hungry" is a very polite way to say "I'm very hungry". In BrE quite (which is much more common in conversation) may have this meaning, as in "quite right" or "quite mad", but it more commonly means "somewhat", so that in BrE "I'm quite hungry" can mean "I'm somewhat hungry".
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_American_and_B...
The more I think about it, I think the word can mean quite a lot of things and it's mostly driven by context and non-verbal cues.
It's interesting that you have such a different experience of it to me.
https://archive.org/details/EconomistBooksTheEconomistStyleG...
Something similar happened between Spanish Spanish and Argentinian Spanish.
I once used the phrase "a veces" in South America and I was corrected to "de vez en cuando". Both phrases mean "occasionally", but the first seems to me to be unfamiliar to South Americans. Maybe someone else can clarify exactly.
This doesn’t seem right (as an American)
That seems backwards to me? As an American, I would nearly always use "quite" as an intensifier.
Brits often understate, so it's arguable if "quite" means something different (as words are defined by usage) - or if the words mean the same, but are commonly used in understated terms in Britain.
So to say "that's not quite right" means you're close but something is off.
But to say "that was quite an adventure" means it was totally an adventure, as much as anything could be.
Now be quiet and quit while you're ahead ;)
I don't think this is illustrating two different uses. Note that "not completely right" means the same thing as "not quite right", but this is meant to illustrate that "quite" doesn't always mean "completely".
"If it were up to me..."
That's the correct grammar for when you have a conditional argument. I know that a lot of Americans don't know this rule at all (especially musicians) but I suspect that it is a regional thing and not strictly US vs. Brit.
Note that if the conditional reflects something that really happened, then you use was as usual.
"If I was wrong by saying that..."
In English, what looks like a plural form ("were") in place of a singular ("was") actually comes from a Germanic singular form of the subjunctive. Both the German words "waren" (plural indicative form - "we/they were ...") and "wäre" (singular subjunctive form - "(if) I/he were") become "were" in English.
(And to confuse things, in English, the plural subjunctive is also "were" and is thus indistinguishable from the indicative. "We were kings..." v. "If we were kings...")
In both languages, the subjunctive is used in this case for a condition contrary to fact - I am not the King of Germany (nor am I a German pop singer from the 80s!).
For example:
"Que tengas un buen día,"
would translate to:
"Have a nice day."
So, in Spanish the subjunctive is not strictly used for conditional situations. It is not really that you consider that the other person may have a bad day. The closest way to say that in English is: "May you have a nice day."
Like a lot of commentators are observing, it is not that clear whether you need a subjunctive. In fact, if you look at Afrikaans, there are only four tenses: past, present, future and historical present. And Afrikaans is considered a full scientific languages: You can translate any scientific article into Afrikaans.
On the topic of languages from South Africa, you also have noun classes in all of the 9 official languages that are not derived from European languages. These classes are a type of concord that have nothing to do with tense, but rather with types of nouns. They are also not strictly necessary, but they make it easier to follow a conversation. One way in which they achieve this is that if you say something like "I have an axe and a shovel," and later that "I often use it in the garden," then you will be able to know which one of the two you are referring to since they are in different classes and the word "it" need to be in concord with the noun. If they are in the same class, then you don't have concord distinction when referring to the object. I think the development of this feature are more to distinguish objects and subjects in sentences, as they are more likely to be different types of objects (e.g.: a human and a thing) and hence more likely to be in different noun classes. An axe being in a different class than a shovel is more of an coincidence.
"The doctor insisted that he spend the night."
vs.
"The doctor insisted that he spent the night."
The first sentence is how I would say it.
The second sentence sound very British to me.
I would use the second sentence for both cases. If I needed to distinguish them, I'd probably add something like "last week" or something to clarify things.
No, it's subjunctive vs. indicative.
The British form is indicative and past tense, which is not correct grammar under either British or American rules, but is used in common speech.
Replace the verb with "to be", e.g. "the doctor insisted he be here." vs. "The doctor insisted he were here." to illustrate that the past subjunctive doesn't fit.
The past subjunctive is almost exclusively used for hypotheticals, e.g. "If I were rich...."
This isn't hypothetical. This is a mandative statement, so we use the infinitive form of the verb even if the action took place in the past.
- Hey, how did you know he was the perp? He wasn't even on our suspects list!
- Remember when we asked him about our victim? He said, "If it was up to me", not "If it were"... which clearly suggested it was up to him.
As far as musicians go, you can find examples of people on both sides of the pond using or not using the subjunctive. Beyoncé sings "If I were a boy," while Thom Yorke sings "I wish I was special."
Whilst I can understand the argument for the latter being similar to "on purpose", it will never stop sounding wrong to my British ears.
I do hear 'by accident' but always (as a native speaker of British English, born and living in England) consider it an error.
I have at least heard of 'on accident' too, but interestingly it barely registers on Google's ngram viewer, even with 'American English' selected:
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=accidentally%2...
Disclaimer : I came to this conclusion from being a native English speaker and picking up differences whilst learning foreign languages so don't take it as fact!
Interesting, didn't know the name for that, thanks!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verb_phrase_ellipsis
> where Americans [...] "I could"
Which almost makes me grind my teeth in anticipation of 'care less' following it. (A BrE speaker would say 'could not care less', which has the benefit of, you know, actually making sense! ;))
So for your example:
> He gave it to Tom and I.
Change it to:
> He gave it to I.
That's clearly weird, so it should actually be:
> He gave it to me.
And then re-incorporating the other person:
> He gave it to Tom and me.
When I see your version in my mind it's a mistake and my theory is it's a common misunderstanding of the rule, consider the following slightly different scenario which is a super common mistake in my experience:
> Me and Tom went to the movies.
That is clearly wrong when applying the rule and should be:
> I and Tom went to the movies.
Although I feel that this sounds better:
> Tom and I went to the movies.
I think that what often happens (at least it did for me) is that children making the above mistake only ever see the correction without being reminded of or taught the actual rule, so they incorrectly assume the rule is something like:
> Always use "I" when talking about yourself and someone else.
I live in South Africa and we use British English, but I would expect the rule to be the same for American English too.
It annoys me so much more than the converse, wrongly saying 'me', because - as you allude to - it sounds like conscious effort, like they thought they were actively getting it right. That may not be true of course, it's just how it comes across to me.
AmE: in a moment; BrE: for a moment.
Obviously it's blurred, particularly in BrE with televisual influence from America. Although I notice Wiktionary gives the latter unqualified, and the former as US & proscribed.
The package will arrive from Amazon in two weeks
The package will arrive from Amazon in two weeks time
> The package will arrive from Amazon in two weeks' time
British, American
"in future" , "in the future"
"in hospital" , "in the hospital"
Also in British English it's more common to construct a sentence such as:
"A great car, this one." In American English we would almost always say "This is a great car."
Could you use it in a sentence?
There's an entire WP page on these differences that are pretty interesting.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_and_British_English_g...
As always, your local dialect may differ!
I'd probably say "in future, could you please refrain from eating loudly" but "in the future, we will have flying cars". "The future" would refer to the magical world full of fancy new technology, while "in future" is more along the lines of "from now on".
"I'm in hospital" makes perfect sense but "I'm in the hospital" works perfectly fine as well. I don't think either is incorrect in English.
Regarding the sentence construction, I wouldn't understand "a great car, this one" as a standalone sentence. Written, it'd have to be "it's a great car, this one". Spoken, I'd expect there to be either something spoken prior (e.g. "Isn't she lovely. A great car, this one.") or some kind of non-verbal cue (like a look of pride or fondness that essentially expresses the same thing).
But again, Australian, not English.
We'd never say "in future, could you please refrain from eating loudly." There would always be a "the" after "in".
"I'm in hospital." same thing, "in the"
If someone said "Isn't she lovely. A great car, this one." I'd think they were trying to imitate a Brit.
I was also under the impression that the "efficiency" argument was at least partially influenced by Thomas Jefferson. I just did a brief search and I wasn't able to find reference to this online, but from my visits to his home at Monticello I recall that he had a unique style of writing - for instance, he tended not to use capital letters in his personal notes. He seems like exactly the kind of person who would have been vocally in favor of dropping unvocalized letters from words.
(or is it en-uk? Hmmm)
But I don't think that would happen because I don't see why Scotland would want to leave the UK but cling to 'we are still in GB -- no-no, it's geographical guys'. You don't hear the Republic of Ireland self-descring as 'in the British Isles' much, that I'm aware of.
UK is a reserved code due to past and current use in DNS.
Ukraine's code is UA.
Of course, its always hard to draw distinct lines. There are some lang codes with wikipedias that are similar to english like sco, jam and ang. (Not to mention https://simple.wikipedia.org but that is a bit of a special case)
Other language wikipedias also value topics differently. A British English wikipedia would prefer citations from Britain. In many national cases it would merit having more than one article or articles of different opinion.
- "The Beatles are..." This means we're talking about those 4 guys in The Beatles
- "Metallica is..." Means we're talking about the band, not the 4 dudes.
And when that change happens (inferring the band vs inferring the band members) it doesn't change the meaning of the sentence, so nothing else matters.
I see what you did there.