Hacker News Reader

Comment by coderdude | Hacker News Reader

Americans go by what makes sense linguistically rather than the blanket usage of 'have' and 'are'. British usage is more consistent (usage-wise) but half the time it sounds wrong because "Google have employees" doesn't make sense by other rules of English.

View on HN

Sounds wrong to you. Just as the American usage sounds wrong to me. It's utterly subjective and completely meaningless. Might as well be arguing that people in Scotland talk wrong.

Actually, if both ways "sound wrong" to people who aren't used to them, but one way is consistent, then I'd argue it's the objectively "better" way.

By the way I'm used to the American usage, myself.

I'm not sure that many British people would use that phrasing either (a search for "Google have employees" returns 21 results including several duplicates involving a phrase which is correct in American English too. A search for "Google has employees" returns >15000 results)

Metonymic pluralisation in British English isn't "blanket" but done with the specific intent of implying the importance of collective input. Google the corporate entity has many employees but Google's engineering team have won the search engine wars. Microsoft is still a corporate behemoth but they are often accused of being ineffective at interdepartmental communication these days.

"People say this" is the definition of "this makes linguistic sense"

Even then, it's still not nearly consistent. For example, I suspect most would say that Doctors Without Borders is a very widely respected organization.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com