The Time I Thought I Knew

I sent this letter to the editor of Time Magazine after finding a grammatical error on Time.com:

From: Don Severs [donsevers@mchsi.com]
Sent: Saturday, March 13, 2004 2:25 PM
To: letters@time.com
Subject: The Time I thought I Knew

Dear friends:

I wrote to you yesterday about Tony Karon’s title, The Shiites The U. S. Think it Knows. I now understand how your editor let this pass. “States” is plural, requiring the plural verb “Think”. “United” is just a modifier. The problem is you then used the singular pronoun, it. If you want to take this position, you need to say, The Shiites The U. S. Think They Know.

My assertion was that that the term “United States” is a collective singular noun requiring a singular verb, yielding “The Shiites the U. S. Thinks it Knows”. I still would avoid this construction, since it is questionable to say that States have opinions, such as in this statement, “Exxon grieves loss of tanker”. Groups of people have opinions, but corporations and states, existing only on paper, don’t.

I hope that you’re not thinking I’m a relic. I love reading Time because it makes me occasionally look up a word in the dictionary. Written language is in great peril due to e-mail and apathy. Will you be the Druids of language and preserve good grammar through the information age?

Best regards,

Don Severs
www.donsevers.com


The cool part was that I first wrote to them on a Friday and, on Monday, they'd changed their website.  Here you can see their website on Monday with my surfing History showing the way the page read on Friday.

I must plug Eats, shoots and leaves by Lynn Truss here.  My favorite example of the importance of punctuation (from an interview I heard on NPR) is "Those old things over there are my husbands".  Substituting wives, I ought to be able to use that in conversation someday.