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Comment by yaddayadda | Hacker News Reader

"...I created at University and I was proud of it in many ways.

Disney have used it..."

If she passed any English classes or graduated from the mentioned university, then she deserves a tuition refund.

She is British (it says so on her site). Using plural verbs with organizations ("the police are coming", etc.) is perfectly correct British English; same for "at university" [1].

[1] http://www.amazon.co.uk/Writing-at-University-Phyllis-Creme/...

"the police is coming" is not correct American English, so it's unclear what you have revealed by using "the police are coming".

I'm not a native speaker, and learned British English in school, American English through informal practice while living there, so I may not have picked the greatest example. :)

You are correct, though "the police are coming" isn't really a good example as that is proper American English, too.

"Disney have used it" is correct here, in British English.

"It’s one of my favourite images I created at University" could use a [while] to my ear, but it's not so bad.

The world is a big place.

> "Disney have used it" is correct here, in British English.

Is it even a matter of US vs. British English? I thought collective nouns could be treated as either singular or plural when conjugating the verb.

I think it is. I don't know the rules, but I've never heard a US English speaker use an entity like "Disney" as plural. That said, "the police" is always plural, and I have no idea why that's different.

In the US, I would never say "The government have shut down" or "The team have lost." I would treat them as singular entities.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_noun#Metonymic_mergi...

In the US, a corporation is a person in matters both legal and grammatical.

As she mentions elsewhere, she is British. And "Disney have used it" is perfectly valid in the Queen's English, even if it sounds odd to us yanks.

It's not correct American English, but she's not American.

The only thing I'm not sure is correct in non-American usage is the capitalized "University"; I thought they used lowercase for the generic (much in the same way we use "college" in the US). The rest, though, reflects common usage outside the US.

You're just showing how bad your grasp of the English language is!

why the heck did you write this? It doesn't help anyone ...

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