CONTEMPORARY SPEECH

New Zealand Listener, Volume 21, Issue 526, 22 July 1949, Page 5

CONTEMPORARY SPEECH

Sir,-As a working journalist, I should like’ to answer Richard Dennant’s strictures on written English, published in The Listener of July 1. I agree that an orchestra is a body, but they are also men. Station 1YA can be similarly treated as a plural if considered as the embodiment of programme organisers, announcers, technicians and others. I can best put my case" by quoting from that standard authority, H. W. Fowler’s Modern English Usage: ‘ Such words as army, fleet, Government, company, party, pack, crowd, mess, number, majority, may stand either for a single entity or for the individuals who cofnmpose it, and are called nouns of multitude. They are treated as singular or plural at! dis-cretion-and sometimes, naturally, without discretion, The Cabinet is divided is better, because in the order of thought a whole must precede division; and The Cabinet are agreed is better, because it takes two or more to agree. That is a delicate distinction, and few will be at the pains to make it. Broader ones that few will fail to make are that between The army is on a voluntary basis and The army are above the average civilian height, and that between The party lost their hats and The party Jost its way. In general it may be said that while there is always a better and a worse in the matter, there is seldom a right and a wrong, end any attempt to elaborate rules would be waste labour. For my part, I hope that writers will continue to follow the tolerant tenets of the translator of Lucian and lexicographer of the Pocket and Concise Oxford Dictionaries. The Listener’s staff are doing no damage to the English

language

J. O.

BUTLER

(Auckland).