I have written to a TV station in Birmingham, Alabama, that has made a commercial that "toots on a big horn" about the supposed abilities of its people who appear in its broadcasts (news, weather reporting, etc.) This one has been broadcast ad infinitum!

That commercial has the wretched sentence, "... your team, whoever it is...."
This short span of words has multiple, glaring problems in it.
1. A team is not a "who", but rather, an "it", and that statement concedes this fact with "it is". (The word "whoever" is really grating here.)
2. The writer of that commercial could have lapsed all the way into British English wiith "your team, whoever they are." Instead, what we got was a hodgepodge of different varieties of English -- a hodgepodge that is grating on our ears.

Finally, I will correct everything with "... your team, whichever one it is...."

Wow! This version has clearly singular nouns, pronouns, and subordinating conjunctions all the way through, and it treats "team" as a collective noun, as it should be in the American Language.

We also need this, "The manager of the TV station has PLED guilty to multiple misdemeanors, and he has resigned from his position."
D.A.W.

"The headquarters of the British Commonwealth is in London, England."
Of course, the subject of this sentence is "headquarters", but I am pleased to read that even in Great Britain, "the Commonwealth is".
I suppose that the United Nations, Parliament, NATO, the European Union, the U.S. Congress, SHAPE, and SHADO are all singular there, just as they are in North America.

However, I have read or heard these in British publications: "the RAF are", "Rolls Royce were", "the Royal Family are", and (EGAD!) "the United States are".

As for "waters": "The waters of the Atlantic Ocean became his final resting place after his ship sank," where each of the nouns in this sentence is singular.

A great ways to compose sentences are:
1. Make all of the nouns and pronouns singular in the main clauses.
2. Make all of the nouns and pronouns plural in the main clauses.

We have a big problem in the USA about the following, especially among people who are on TV or on the radio. (They are professionals,mind you, who are being paid for their work. I am not picking on laymen.)
In the midst of their sentences that otherwise had all singular nouns and pronouns, suddenly there appears one of these words { they, them, their } -- which are plural pronouns. We listeners are left to guess what is the antecedent of the pronoun.

I have written e-mail to some TV stations in Alabama about this, and the response that I got (if any) was "fiddle-dee-dee", or words to that effect.

I wrote the person back to tell him / her, "Well, then, you will never get a better and higher-paying job in a big city like Atlanta, Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Houston, Indianapolis, Kansas City, Los Angeles, Miami, Nashville, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, San Francisco, St. Louis, Tampa, or Washington, D.C."
Furthermore, "Reach for the stars. You might not get there, but you will go a long way." I think that there are millions and millions of people who do not have any ambition.
D.A.W.

Most German words that are moden creations have been given "natural" grammatical gender. Hence there are lots of modern words like these:
das Auto, das Bakterium, das Benzin (gasoline or petrol), das Fahrrad, das Fernrohr (telescope), das Flugzeug, das Foto, das Gebaude (building), das Geschütz, das Golf (the sport), das Problem, das Mikroskop, das Radio, das Radar, das Steuer (steering wheel), das Tennis, and das U-boot. .

However, "Fahrrad" (bicycle) is a compound word, and its last piece (meaning wheel) was neuter to begin with. Likewise, the word for television set is neuter, but it is a compound word, and its last part is a word that is always neuter. Compound words get their genders from their last parts, and not from their first parts.

On the other hand, there are words whose spelling demands a different gender, such as der Laser, der Transistor, and der Motor, and some seem to have been given a different gender through just stubbornness, sucn as der Microchip amd die Kamera.

When the verb "senden" means "to transmit", it is a regular verb.Otherwise, it is an irregular verb. There are some other verbs in German like this with an old meaning and a new meaning.

The names of most chemical elements are neuter. See: das Eisen.
However, der Stahl (steel) is maculine. .
The names of most countries are neuter, but some of the Middle Eastern countries are masculine, it could be argued that "die Schweiz" is plural, and "die Vereinigte Staaten" is definitely plural (even though it is singular in English).

The German word for "banana" is feminine, no matter how much it looks like it ought to be masculine! The words for "pear" and "cucumber" are feminine, and the words for peach and apple are masculine, so there is no rhyme or reason for these.

DAW

Well, which is it ??

A news announcer on the CBS station in Birmingham, Alabama, said,

"The headquarters are..."

I tend to disagree. "Headquarters" is a collective noun, and hence it is singular even though it ends in "s".

I would be a lot more likely to say,

"The headquarters of NATO is in Brussels, Belgium," or
"The NATO headquarters is in Brussels, Belgium."

"The fictional Supreme Headquarters, Alien Defence Organisation (SHADO) is in London, England."

The above name seems to have been modeled directly on the Supreme Headquarters, Allied Powers in Europe (SHAPE), which is in the area of Brussels, too. Fortunately for us, SHAPE does not have too much to do anymore.

(Back during the mid-1960s, the Belgian government asked that SHAPE be built at least 30 kilometers outside of Brussels. On the other hand, from the pictures that I have seen, SHADO seems to have been built right in the middle of London.)

"The headquarters of the Department of State is in Foggy Bottom in Washington, D.C."

"The headquarters of the British Commonwealth is in London, England."

Here are a couple of double ones for you:
"The headquarters of the United Nations is in New York City."
"The headquarters of General Motors is in Detroit, Michigan."

"The headquarters of the American Department of Defense is in the Pentagon Building in Northern Virginia."

"The headquarters of the British Ministry of Defence is in London."

D.A.W.

Oh, dear. You mean "I love driving my Jaguar. She is a car which comes from England."
I don't see any point in using "which" instead of "that'. In North American English, "that" is a perfectly-good subordinating conjunction. In reading recent publications from England, it is apparent that a large of writers there have been innoculated agsainst the word "that". They just begin subordinate clauses w/o any subordinating conjunctions OR subordinating pronouns there.The independent clause just runs into the dependent clause with no kind of a connector at all.

Let me let you in or something. We Americans and Canadians have you outnumbered by a great majority. You might as well yield on some points.

Back during World War II, there was a big push by some over there to make a Briton the Supreme Commander in the West. However, President Roosevelt would not hear of it - not at all. That is how General Eisenhower of the U.S. Army became the Supreme Commander in the West. The U.S. Army provided twice as many troops and aircraft as all of the others put together.
Then Field Marshal Alexander in Italy was sent to Burma, and the American General Mark Clark took over as the Supreme Commander in Italy.
There are just lots of things that Americans have done the best.

"I love driving my Ford Mustang. She is a car that comes from Detroit."
No more British, French, Italian, or Japanese cars.
"I also fly everywhere in a Boeing 767."

DAW

I said: "Most words in English that have a gender"
Most nouns in English do not have any grammatical gender at at all.

That is something that was disposed of during the couple of centuries following the Norman Conquest, when the common people of England were left to their own devices concerning their language, while the Normans spoke archaic French with each other.

Hence in English, we don't have any gender (besides "it') for those common things in German that do, else we use the natural gender, such as for apple, boy, chair, dog, door, egg, eye, floor, foot, girl (neuter in German), hammer, hat, knife, leg, nose, peach, plate, road, slave, street, table, tooth, train, wall, wagon, ball-point pen (der Kugelschreiber).
Grammatical gender must be good for something, but for those of us who grew up on English, it all seems like a terrible mess of complication for nothing.

As an engineer, I was highly amused to read that the French were having deep discussions about whether it should be "la microchip" or "le microchip". Very tough, since French does not have neuter.

The French Academy finally decided to accept "bulldozer", but they decided that the pronunciation should be a lot different than in English -- with four syllables instead of just three, to start with.

In English, there is a big difference between having no gender at all and having neuter gender. For example, my computer doesn't have any gender at all.
In contrast, "Der Computer" in German is masculine.

Maybe computers ought to be feminine because of the many times and many ways that they simply act CONTRARY !
I often want to put mine in the dunking stool. If you have never hear about one of those, you have to read about them in the history of Colonial New England - LOL !
D.A.W.

I noticed this morning that I was using a spell-checker that does not recognize the word "catsup". It flags this as a misspelled word -- and most users jump to the conclusion that it really IS misspelled. ("Ketchup" is in there.)

Also, missing in the same spell-checker are the words "gauge", "venusian", "jovian", "saturnian", and many other scientific and technological words. Also, Yahoo steadfastly refuses to add any words whatsoever to its spell-checking dictionary, including "Las", "Los", "Angeles". Hence, if you are writing to someone about your trip from Los Angeles to Las Vegas, you run into a slew of supposedly misspelled words.

"Air gauge", "gas gauge", "pressure gauge", and gauge theories in physics cause real problems. Also, these problems are caused by sheer laziness.
D.A.W.

"It's true that some people will try to sound more intelligent by attempting to be verbose. This can cause quite a distraction during conversation."

During a conversation?? No, they WRITE IT ALL DOWN, and that is the big problem!

When I used the word "saying" before, I should have used "stating", which covers both written and verbal communications.

This leads us to a recenty-developed and serious problem that is especially from companies like the Associate Press: "said in a statement".
WHO decided that this one was needed -- because "stated" means exactly the same thing.

The people of the Associated Press have decided that they will do as they please, no matter how much evidence and history is to the contrary. Its writers do not want to call ships of the sea "she" and "her". I pointed out to them that this goes all the way back 2,000 or more years to the Roman Republic, where the word for "ship" in Latin is a feminine noun.

All spaceships and starships are feminine, too. All you have to do is to watch STAR TREK, in which Captain Kirk referred to the USS ENTERPRISE as "she" and "her".

The Space Shuttles COLUMBIA, CHALLENGER, ENDEAVOUR, etc., were all "she", too.

(It is true that in German, the word das Schiff is neuter, but so what? In German, the words for most modern forms of transportation are neuter, including das Auto, das Flugzeug, das Raumschiff (spaceship), das Fahrrad (bicycle), and das Boot (boat), Unfortunately, der Eisenbahnzug (train) is masculine. Most words in English that have a gender use the gender that comes from French and Latin.
"I love driving my Jaguar. She is a car that comes from England.")

DAW

That onethat you wrote, Angie's, is quite wordy and full of syllables. You must have missed out on everything about communicating efficiently.

That is just like the current craze for saying "correctional facility" instead of "jail" or "prison"; "high-level health care facility" instead of "hospital", "governmental headquarters" instead of "capitol" or "capital city"; "educational facility" instead of "school", "weapons testing facility" instead of "firing range" or "proving ground".

Give us a break, You want to make every paragraph twice as long as it needs to be.
D.A.W.

Great news on cable TV news in the U.S. this afternoon:

"Three indicted co-conspirators have PLED guilty..."

This was concerning a plot to commit an act of large-scale terrorism in New York City. The cretins had plotted to set off a large explosion in a subway tunnel there.

D.A.W.