Timeline for Lots of questions on the plurality of collective nouns, sets, and organizations
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
11 events
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| Jun 15, 2020 at 7:39 | history | edited | CommunityBot |
Commonmark migration
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| Apr 4, 2015 at 6:07 | comment | added | zeel | There are good answers, there are good questions, and there are threads that are still open. Unfortunately there are not any threads that have all of those things - or if they do, they aren't actually my question just similar enough that someone thought the others were duplicates. | |
| Apr 4, 2015 at 4:05 | comment | added | Mari-Lou A | @zeel are you saying there are only bad/poor answers? That's not my experience, there are some fine answers; however, I'd agree it is tricky to immediately spot them. One has to search, if the first OP doesn't answer one's question. Nevertheless, how many answers that echo the divergence between BrEng and AmEng usage do you need to read? | |
| Apr 2, 2015 at 13:48 | comment | added | zeel | @sumelic And more generally, how are SE sites supposed to handle this kind of problem? I'm not stupid, I can do research and figure out the answer to my question if I need to - but the point of SE is to provide good answers, which in this (and other) instances it is not. Instead we have a bunch of poor answers spread across multiple questions. There are useful bits in all of it, but digging them up takes more effort than looking for an article elsewhere. If I wasn't a big SE user, I would have just gone back to Google and clicked the next item. | |
| Apr 2, 2015 at 1:41 | comment | added | herisson | I also see Zeel's point, which is not just about this particular issue. What is the best thing for a questioner to do when there are previous questions that are similar, but that are all closed, and that don't answer this person's question? If this issue is really so specific as to have no general answer, then the previous questions are not really "duplicates". | |
| Apr 1, 2015 at 19:58 | comment | added | Dan Bron | What I still don't get is quite where the line is drawn with the British corporate are. As in "Morgan Stanley are in the process of..." (where we AmEs would say is), or "*The GCHQ are ..", etc. | |
| Apr 1, 2015 at 14:41 | comment | added | tchrist Mod | @FumbleFingers “All” contexts? Not at all. Try it with couple. | |
| Apr 1, 2015 at 14:30 | comment | added | FumbleFingers | It's not exactly a "great rule", but I think there's an "unmistakable tendency" for AmE to reflect strict syntax in all contexts, whereas BrE is more flexible according to semantics. So although the British family is united (just as its American counterpart), we don't necessarily have a problem with saying Our family are divided over the issue. | |
| Apr 1, 2015 at 3:29 | comment | added | zeel | This doesn't really address the issue at hand. I'm not asking for a definitive answer, or technically for anything - this is a discussion after all - I'm pointing out that while this site has many questions about the topic in question, they don't do a very good job answering it because half of them get closed as duplicates of the others, even though those questions aren't really related, or don't have answers. The requisite information exists on this site, but not a clear or generally helpful form. | |
| Apr 1, 2015 at 2:18 | history | edited | tchristMod | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
added 4 characters in body
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| Apr 1, 2015 at 1:40 | history | answered | tchristMod | CC BY-SA 3.0 |