The company are using teh PDF

Nothing is worse than a clueless author who thinks he knows grammar. In this sentence:

"Swire made a commitment to adopt PDF as their preferred format"

I changed "their" to "its". This is routine stuff, because a/ the house style of my publisher is to use the singular for companies and the like and b/ it's the most common usage by far.

But the author was outraged. He said:

Their is grammatically correct but frowned on by purists because it can not be translated directly in Latin

Leaving aside that you learn that "cannot" is one word in third grade, what can we say about this nonsense?

"Their is grammatically correct"

"Their" is grammatically correct if you consider that companies are plural in person and incorrect if you don't. Given that my publisher doesn't, and I don't, it's simply not. Why don't we? Because a company is a single thing. That's pretty simple. There are times when single things that are collections of other things are considered as collections of things rather than composites, and then one uses the plural. "The staff each receive a lollipop" is an example. "The crowd left their seats one by one" is another. (The latter can also take the singular.) An exception for me is football teams, which by convention take the plural. I note though that if I was editing a book on football for this publisher, football teams would take the singular, because the convention is different in Australia.

But can't "Swire" be taken to be the collection of people within it? I challenge you to find an example in which that reading would make more sense than the single-thing one. Go on. Give it a go.

"but frowned on by purists because it can not be translated directly in Latin"

What teh eff? This comment left me dumbfounded, and that doesn't often happen. Which bit can't be translated into Latin? "Its"? I think you'll find it can. Does he mean that Latin is stricter in agreeing for number, and that insisting on those fuddyduddy Latiny rules is cramping his style, man?

Well, who knows? I can't think of anything in Latin that would have much bearing on this kind of construction. We use the singular with companies because they are unitary. "I sent it to Swire" does mean "I sent it to somebody who works for Swire" because ultimately there is someone at Swire who opens the mail, or picks it up or whatever, but I think that arguing that Swire is a metonym for all its employees is perverse here. (Cf "Washington", in which the name of the capital is a metonym for the government of the United States; in Australia, these metonyms strictly take the singular, whereas they sometimes take the plural in the UK: "Washington has taken the hard line with Teheran/Washington have taken the hard line with Teheran". The latter is slightly awkward for me, but possible.) I think it should be compared with "the United Kingdom" or "Australia". These are single entities that have constituents, but are always considered as composites. Conceptually, the difference is easy. A crowd is coextensive with its constituents. If I say "crowd", I mean all the people in the crowd. (If I say "Arsenal", I can be taken to mean "all the players of Arsenal" or similar, I suppose.) But the UK is not coextensive with its citizens. It is something that contains its population. A crowd cannot be considered separately from the people in it; it just is those people (and note that one does not write "they" in that sentence!).

Have I captured the difference correctly? Can you analyse it differently? Answers on a postcard. Or in the comments.

posted by Dr Zen @ 1:03 pm