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Comment by Twisol | Hacker News Reader

I've heard some people (I think mostly in the UK?) treat corporation names as count nouns, as in "Jagex are" (or "Facebook are") rather than "Jagex is". I can see how this makes sense if you think of a corporation as fundamentally comprising a group of individual people, but it still sounds very strange to my ear.

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I don't think this has anything to do with grammatical matters like count/mass nouns. It's just that a word for a collective can often be used either to refer to the collective as a whole, or to its individual members.

> Manchester City is a team with a long history.

> Manchester City are lined up on the field.

The count/mass noun issue comes into play when one is counting the thing in question, in which case corporations are clearly count nouns. E.g. you'd refer to several new Facebook-like corporations as "a new crop of Facebooks", not "..of Facebook".

People nevertheless still say “Manchester City are a team” (and that sounds correct to my UK ear).

I suspect that you are younger than me (59) and that you have been influenced by US usage.

Younger than you and in the US and I don't know anyone who would use "are" here.

Sure, and they sometimes say "Manchester City is lined up on the field." There's no single rule, it's a question of what's emphasized.

I don’t think that is at all common in English English.

I think e.g. Facebook as a product is singular: "Facebook is a social network".

But Facebook as a company is plural: "Facebook are certain that metaverse is going to be big". This is because a company cannot think and be certain, so the full form is actually "Folks at Facebook are certain that metaverse is going to be big", and it makes perfect grammatical sense.

I agree that "Folks (at Facebook) are certain..." sounds right, but less sure about "Facebook are certain...".

Why is "folks" the right way to think about that? Why is it not "Mark (Zuckerberg) (at Facebook) is certain..."?

I'm a bit wary of offering a logical explanation for something that is less reasoned and more habitual/cultural, but if I had to, I'd say corporations present a single unified posture that is not necessarily reflective of the posture of any single constituent of the corporation. Thus, it is somewhat fallacious to attribute that (carefully curated) posture to any(/many/most/all) of the individuals within that corporation.

Incidentally, I think it's funny (but justifiable) that you used "is" here:

> But Facebook as a company is plural

I think the implied statement is "the word for Facebook as a company is plural".

Are you singular, or the amalgamation of constituent cells?

I are both, really

Yes, deciding the grammatical number of a noun based on its meaning rather than its form is common in British English: “My family are coming to see me.” “The government have decided to….”

> Jagex is powerless against bots.

This sounds natural to me.

Perhaps it makes sense if you hunk of it as a company (inherently a mass noun) rather than a corporation (i.e. a “body”, inherently a count noun).

I’m from UK and “Jagex is” sounds equally weird. What pronoun would you use for a corporation? I would use “they”. Would you use “It”?

On introspection, I think I would/have used both "it" and singular (agender) "they" for corporations.

In the US, "they" is a pretty common singular, non-gendered pronoun. I could see either "they" or "it" being used, depending on sentence structure, but not necessarily due to plurality or countability.

But even when "they" is used as a singular pronoun, its verb conjugation doesn't change from its plural variant. It's still "they are", even when singular.

“You” works the same way, for the same reason: originally it was only plural (and “you” started to be used as a singular later than “they”).

Notice “skate” versus “skates” in these cases:

- Alice skates; Alice is a skater.

- Alice and Bob skate; Alice and Bob are skaters.

- She skates; she is a skater.

- You skate; you are a skater.

- You skate; you are skaters.

- They skate; they are a skater.

- They skate; they are skaters.

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