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Team USA is the exception
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The 2024 Olympics start next week, and we’re continuing our series on Olympic-themed writing tips. Last week we covered capitalization, and this week we’re discussing another subject that can be confusing and inconsistent: subject-verb agreement. We’ve told you before about how to decide whether collective nouns, such as team, take singular or plural verbs. If the group is acting as a unit, use singular verbs: The team is working to improve its penalty rate. Team names, however, take plural verbs, even when the team being named is acting as a unit: The Dallas Cowboys are going to win the game. But what would an English language rule be without exceptions? Don’t apply this rule about team names to Team USA, which takes singular verbs: Team USA is leading in the medal count. And you might have already noticed that we’ve implicitly answered another Olympic-themed question about subject-verb agreement throughout this series when we use plural verbs with “Olympics” (glance above to the first sentence of this newsletter to see what we mean). What other questions about subject-verb agreement can we help you with? Hit reply and let us know. ❤ Team Stylebot
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Hone your writing skills and never use "hone in" again. Get writing tips, have fun with words and learn something new in a one-minute read each week by signing up for Stylebot’s newsletter.
We don't often think of chairs as being deep. But roots? Absolutely. And therein lies the confusion between "deep-seated" and "deep-seeded." But most of you weren't fooled by last week's quiz — almost 60% of you knew the phrase is "deep-seated." So how did "deep-seeded" get planted (😉) in our minds? Well, for starters, the two phrases sound alike. Plus, "seeded" makes sense in this context. It's a classic eggcorn, a misheard phrase that sometimes makes logical sense. Some other eggcorn...
We had a tie in last week's quiz about how to punctuate the term commonly used for carved pumpkins, with 35% of you choosing "jack o'lanterns" and another 35% choosing "jack-o'-lanterns." So who's right? Let's ask Stylebot 😉 It's tedious, but we put the hyphens and an apostrophe in jack-o'-lantern. Another common format is "jack-o-lantern." "Jack o'lantern" is much less common. So who is Jack? And what's he doing with a lantern? Here's where we tell you what carved pumpkins and marsh gas have...
If you chose "pouring over" in last week's quiz, did you associate the act of studying intently with poor posture? Perhaps pore and pour's fellow homophone can help you remember the correct phrase. Almost everyone who took last week's quiz correctly identified "pour" as the verb to use for serving drinks. But nearly a third of you chose "pouring over" for the act of studying the audit logs, when the correct phrase is poring over. When you hear the phrase "poring over," you might picture...