Star Dell Starts Talking Down Netbooks
Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 14th Oct 2009 16:00 UTC
Hardware, Embedded Systems In what is about as surprising as the sun rising in the morning, Michael Dell has started talking down netbooks. Dell made his comments about netbooks at the Churchill Club in Silicon Valley, and considering the impact of netbooks on manufacturers' bottom lines, it's really not that surprising.
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RE[4]: Uh, what?
by joshv on Wed 14th Oct 2009 20:35 UTC in reply to "RE[3]: Uh, what?"
joshv
Member since:
2006-03-18

Actually using "it" for a corporation or other collective entity is normal as well, though perhaps not as frequently used as 'they'. For example "Apple has had a breakout year with several new products contributing to strong revenue growth, if this continues, it is poised for explosive growth next year." But "they are" could definitely replace "it is" and actually "sounds" a bit more natural to me.

The use of "they" is more a sign of laziness than anything else - American's love "they" as the ultimate generic pronoun. But they can't bring themselves to say "they is" to force agreement.

I think the general rule is that Americans will attempt to interpret something as singular unless forced to do otherwise. If the noun or proper name at all hides the collective nature of the entity in question, we'll refer to it in the singular - "a number of people" pretty blatantly fails to hide the fact that it refers to more than one person, and thus gets the plural treatment.

Actually, American English isn't even consistent on this, and it seems to depend on the area in which you were exposed to it. For example, where I was raised in Pennsylvania, most people used the British form of your expression, i.e. we'd say something like "AT&T are going to open up Skype on the iPhone for 3g access," but not everyone said it like that and there seems to be no officially correct way to handle it. Further, it gets even more interesting as even the people that interpret the company as a single entity will still use the pronoun "they" when referring to it. So, if they were to say, "Apple is really draconian with their hardware lockouts,, it would still turn into "they are really draconian with their hardware lockouts." If you were to treat the company as a singular entity, the correct pronoun would naturally be "it" not "they." When contracted, however, the singular form is always used, or very nearly so. Confused yet? ;) Not surprising though, we Americans aren't consistent with anything except coming up with stupid laws and making asses of ourselves.

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