> 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.
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! shootshootshootshootshootshoot 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
Am I too charitable or is it possible that this guy is actually just joking and entertaining themselves? I can't imagine someone being serious with these threats and at the same time typing out shoot shoot shoot. Maybe it is just a weird hobby. Like when people play the long chess games where they share a board in common space and just make a move every time they happen to pass by and be in the mood. Maybe this person pours themselves a cup of coffee every morning and goes to Wikipedia to do his morning revert.
There is some effect where people contribute often and wonderfully in their area of expertise but turn completely weird outside of it. Stuff like a doctor running into a historically notable alternative medicine topic.
If HN, Reddit, 4chan, Twitter, Youtube comments, etc have taught us anything it's that people who should be mature enough to know better will readily engage in "no u" type arguments like 14yo kids.
It looks like it dies down shortly afterwards but the next day someone gets unblocked ...
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.
The same is true of US English as well, and people will choose one or the other when they're trying to emphasize one perspective or the other.
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.
Yeah, agreed. It's about context. I tend to use plural form even though I'm from the States too. That said, "Angels & Airwaves is a band" sounds more correct simply because it delineates the two proper (plural) nouns as a single (collective) entity very clearly.
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.
I suppose I like "Angels & Airwaves is a band" because the alternative feels ambiguous in a way that creates tension. With "Angels & Airwaves are a band", I'm left wondering if that was the intended sense, or if they made some editing error and what was really meant is, "Angels & Airwaves is a band," or, "Angels & Airwaves are bands."
This is in danger of running into the back/forth that we saw in the Angels and Airwaves Wikipedia page :-)
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" and the postscripted "s" imply plurality, and therefore the use of "are". Nearly all sports teams in the US are pluralized, so it would be "the Seahawks", "the Bears" etc. There are a small handful of counter exactly examples, such as the Utah Jazz and the Miami Heat. But I think most sports fans use their standard sports lexicon that they use for every other team and treat team names as plurals.
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")
I think the use of "The" as part of the name also matters.
"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.
When I think of American sports teams there's usually an understood "The" in front. "Patriots are winning" works fine conversationally but, if you were being a bit more formal or writing it down, you'd say "The Patriots are winning." On the other hand, the city name is singular. "Boston is winning."
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.
The difference is that most U.S. sports teams names are proper nouns in the plural form (49ers, Raiders, etc.), but most motor sports teams are usually referred to as Team <Singlular Noun>. "Team Quaker State is in the lead." If they were the Quaker States, then it would be "Quaker States are in the lead."
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.
This is very true, and yet the British government message about coronavirus is "stay home" rather than "stay at home". It sounds rather odd to me. I wonder if they chose it to sound a bit more casual and relatable, or just to match what people were already likely to be hearing elsewhere online.
"Stay home. Protect the NHS. Save lives." has the ring of a Dominic Cummings slogan. It's in the same vein as "Take back control" or "Get Brexit Done". It's campaigning distilled down to the minimum possible words.
It is a bit weird. As a Brit I would say that the first "home" has changed from a noun to a sort of adjective. It has the same type of meaning as fr example "busy" or "asleep". We quite often say "Sally is home" and it has a similar logic to "Sally is busy" or "Sally is asleep".
The leaflet that came through my door says "STAY AT HOME". The Downing Street letter signed by Boris says "you must stay at home". I have seen "stay home" a few times, which I notice, because it seems like bad English to me.
Just thank god they don't decide to prefix it with a hash to make it more trendy twitter-like youngster hipsters whatever like what the French government is doing (#stayhome / #restezchezvous). Now get off my lawn...
Yeah this is a strange one, my brain reads "helps" as a noun here, it takes an extra beat for it to infill a ghost noun between "little" and "helps" ("every little bit helps")
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
No it is a colloquial saying in Britain, especially in the North of England. Me: "I hurt myself at work, then I lost my wallet and my girlfriend left me", Someone else: "It never rains, but it pours".
Honestly, as an American (California n almost all of my life), I find both “by accident” and “on accident” to generally sound stilted, though “by accident” seems natural in certain broader constructions, and “on accident” fits in the unique case of a direct contrast with “on purpose”. Generally, though, “accidentally” is the term that sounds right.
In America it's a regional thing. "By accident" is east coast, "on accident" is more midwest and west coast (though given that the west coast is full of transplants, there's a mix in usage". I've lived in CA for 16 years, but grew up in NJ and MD, and "on accident" still sounds weird to me.
I'm Australian rather than English but a lot of these sound odd to me.
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).
I'm not sure about your first example... I thought to myself "As an Englishman, what would I think about in the future?" and can't figure out a way to omit 'the'.
One I've noticed is patterns of misuse of pronoun case in conjoined noun phrases. Americans are more likely to use "me" for the subject, as in "Tom and me did thus and so". The British are more likely to use "I" as the object of a preposition, as in "He gave it to Tom and I". I suspect this is because British teachers are more likely to correct and shame students who commit the first error, so they decide the subject forms are the safer bet.
I was taught a very simple rule around this, if you remove the other person you're referring to, is the sentence still grammatically correct?
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.
The rule is the same in british and american english. What parent was pointing out is that the type of error that brits vs americans make is different. Which is interesting.
I absolutely hate it when people wrongly say 'I', really makes me cringe. (I don't say anything of course, and hope I don't show it!)
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.
English has largely lost the nominative/accusative distinction with the relative/interrogative pronouns "who" and "whom." The first person personal "I" and "me" are probably next. The nom./acc. distinction doesn't provide any useful information that isn't already conveyed by word order or prepositions. At this point, the distinction is a vestige of earlier forms of the language that were less analytic. And given that even decently educated native speakers fail to make this distinction, it's hard to make the case it's an actual error outside the register of formal writing.
There are many small differences. Not grammatical but some off the top of my head:
* 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.
> Quite means something different. In British "quite good" is similar to "particularly good". In American it's more like "OK",
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.
It depends how you say it. For me the default in British is still an intensifier, but you can signal that you're using the American way using context, tone, facial expression etc.
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.
GLOWBE (which I linked above) has Americans in the wild using both senses of quite. If anything it looks like they use it as an intensifier more often than we do.
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".
GLOWBE seems to be stuff scraped from forums. Unless I'm missing something. I think there's a huge difference with how "quite" is used in written and spoken contexts.
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.
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.
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.)
> We have some flexibility on our American usage of "quite" but it means "nearly" or "almost completely", unless it means "totally!" So to say "that's not quite right" means you're close but something is off.
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".
That's quite fair! I can't quite put my finger on how we have quite a few ways of using "quite" to mean quite different things. In all my examples, the meaning is quite similar. Quite the challenge, really.
> In British "quite good" is similar to "particularly good"
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.
Is Jeremy Clarkson "very posh"? Just one example off the top of my head of someone who would use "quite good" in the British way.
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".
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.
Where in America have you heard "quite good" used as "Ok?" I've only ever heard it used in an imitation British way, usually of the quality that includes "Tip tip cheerio" or "Guvn'r."
American speaker here, for me the accent falls in address according to which form the word takes; such that a'ddress is the noun while address' is the verb.
That's a good point. For some reason we don't adjust the pronunciation on that one, but we do on other words like "contract": 'contract (noun), con'tract (verb).
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).
> In British "quite good" is similar to "particularly good". In American it's more like "OK"
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.
One of my favourite quirks of English (that obscure language from a small island) is:
"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.
I don't know that this is regional so much as colloquial vs. formal. In the US people recognize that the subjunctive is technically correct and use it in formal writing. But it's very common to violate this rule in speech, so much so that to my ears it sounds less "wrong" than "informal."
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."
I think that's subjunctive, right? Subjunctive in English is indeed really obscure... I seem to recall the rules being weird in English, but I think it was something along the lines of: you have to use subjunctive when the hypothetical would be outright impossible? (e.g. "If I were you") In your example it's unclear whether that's the case or not as it might depend on the context, so my understanding was it might need to be indicative in that case. I think that's a bit different from being conditional, though, right?
yes - subjunctive. It comes from English's Germanic roots. Compare the German, "Wenn ich König von Deutschland wäre..." to the English translation, "If I were King of Germany..." and note the similarity of the verbs "wäre" and "were."
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!).
The other interesting thing about the subjunctive is that it is not preserved in translation.
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 subjunctive and conditional are complimentary. In the construction "If X then Y," X will be in the subjunctive and Y will be in the conditional. The conditional also comes up on its own in lots of places, but the subjunctive rarely exists outside of contexts that could be re-written in that form.
I don't think it needs to be impossible, merely hypothetical. For example, I might say, "If I were to go into town today, is there anything you would like me to get for you?"
It's past subjunctive. The present subjunctive is still around but scarce: "Lest he think less of me" or, in a frozen expression, "Be it ever so humble ...".
But that's present vs past tense, which is independent of the subjunctive mood. The indicative version of the first sentence would be "insisted that he spends." While placing the verb form into the past tense sounds odd to my American ears, the form "spent" could be either indicative or subjunctive. (The subjective is formed by using the plural form, which makes it indistinguishable in many cases, including the past tense of regular verbs.)
> But that's present vs past tense, which is independent of the subjunctive mood.
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.
Us British would say the first if the doctor has (in the past) insisted that you will (in the future) spend the night and the second if you (in the past) spent the night because the doctor insisted. Is that not the same in the US?
Interesting, I wasn't aware that there was a such distinction in British English between the two. Thanks for sharing.
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.
I doubt very many people in the US would give it enough thought to distinguish between those cases. It would be ambiguous, and if the speaker were needing to be more specific they would explicitly add context: "The doctor insisted that he spend the night tonight".
Not strictly "grammar", probably more "style", but I've noticed that contractions split differently sometimes. I would say "I haven't gone to the store", but I hear many people with a BrE background say "I've not gone to the store" instead.
In my opinion as someone who speaks BrE - 'gone' is only really used with I've because it makes the person the subject of the sentence. With I haven't the subject is the action of going to the store therefore in BrE you would say "I haven't been to the store"
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!
I think this is in reference to the past perfect tense specifically. So "I have gotten sick" vs "I have got sick". I don't know if the latter is actually used in British English, but it's my understanding that the former would never be used since it's grammatically incorrect in that dialect.
Its not formal english though. The British informal equivalent would be 'you're having me on!' or 'you're having a laugh!' or (rude) 'you're taking the piss'
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! ;))
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.
Ahh, yes, the HMS Rururu set alight in Boston harbor while unloading a bunch of printed Us and loading up a cargo of spoken Rs. To this day, Americans are almost as stingy with their written Us as the Brits are with their spoken Rs.
"British spellings" are an affectation Brits developed to make their language look more French and therefore more prestigious; Americans, who know we're the equals of France, kept the older spellings as recorded by Webster.
The "just so" story that I've heard is that post-colonial Americans have dropped the "u" from "-our" words for two reasons: efficiency, and to set them apart from the English.
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.
The 'u's are attributable to Dr. Johnson (and his desire to make English seem more French and therefore prestigious), but by the 18th century the cultures of Britain and America had diverged quite a bit. No 'u's were ever dropped - they were added - so I doubt this story. (Americans definitely liked setting ourselves apart, though.)
It's quite useful. For example Brazil ARE the best (refers to the Brazilian football team). Whereas Brazil IS the best refers to the country. Chelsea is good could refer to the place or a person. Chelsea are good refers to the team.
Single sentence utterances like this are rare. In context this distinction doesn't actually provide non-redundant information. So calling this "quite useful" is a bit of a stretch.
It is however generally useful to have lots of redundancy in speech. It can help to sort out mishearings and misspeakings. Similarly in handwritten text.
GB is the ISO code for the whole country, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Island. These codes usually avoid choosing letters representing political state like "Kingdom", as it can change.
UK is a reserved code due to past and current use in DNS.
When you install Gentoo, one of the steps is to put your keyboard code into a config file. I put uk instead of gb, without thinking. It took me ages to work out what was going on 8)
Oddly enough the Ukraine metaphor is pretty apt when comparing English to Russian, considering that Eastern Slavic languages came out of Kyiv / Kievan Rus civilization, just as American English originated in England.
I doubt the names would change, personally, but even if they did it would presumably be to 'United Kingdom of England, Wales, and Northern Ireland' (ordering up for hot debate, I'm sure, here I've just replaced GB with consitituents, alphabetised, and removed Scotland ;)) - still a UK.
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.
I imagine that's a joke, but for reference the official policy is that minor regional differences dont get their own lang wikipedia - https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Language_proposal_policy#Req... . Some languages do get semi-automated translation like chinese (simplified vs traditional) or serbian (latin vs cyrillic).
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)
If they are 2 languages they shouldn't share a wiki. It could be heavily interlinked but duplicating an article into the British English wiki doesn't seem like a problem (all language wikipedias do it)
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.
silly though ! and which wikipedia would be in English while the other pages are in American English (or in British English). I mean, neither side would accept their language name to be prefixed ; they are already infighting about what's the correct way to speak English.
I actually prefer the American reasoning but 'are' is still OK in both cases because you can substitute "Angels & Airwaves" by 'singular they'. E.g. "Angels & Airwaves is a band. Some would say that they are a great band." or "The editor became frustrated because they could not understand the logic".
I've noticed there is also seems to be debate over present vs past tense. I've looked up a few bands to see if they were still active and sometimes it seems like they still use "is" instead of "was" but sometimes they do use "was."
What about Nirvana? Or Metallica? I think in the case of "The Beatles" it's clear cut because it sounds like you're talking about insects. But in other cases I think both sound ok because you could either be talking about a group of people, or a movement or a brand.
- "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.
As non-native speaker I think I'd intuitively go with “Metallica is” and “Nirvana is”, but “The Beatles are”. I guess my brain is more wired towards whether the name itself is plural or not.
What about "Dire Straits"? Also plural, but grammatically completely different from "The Beatles" (by which I mean: you could say that John Lennon was a Beatle, but you can't refer to Mark Knopfler as a Dire Strait)
Dire Straits is something that happens to you, it would be used in this context, 'He was in dire straits' meaning, in big trouble of some kind. The straits in question are not a plural of an individual living thing like a Beatle. So I would say 'Dire Straits is a band'. I'm a native British English speaker, that sounds right to me, but my generation weren't formally taught grammar at school so I can't back that up with any fancy grammar words!
Since there appear to be no right answers and I love this topic, I feel the band's name should play a big role in its plurality. I would never say that 'Queen are a band' but I would also not feel like 'The Beatles is a band'. At gun point though, I'd choose the latter.
> 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.