Correctives for Collectives

A reader writes:                                                             Dear Sir,

In her article on the new Chinese leader (p. 29 Guardian, Saturday edition 16/3/13) Tania Branigan referred to his father as 'a mid-ranking cadre'. The word "cadre" should not be used of an individual as it is a collective noun (as are "elite" and "cohort"). The word "cadre" comes from the French word meaning a " frame" (as in picture) and refers to what we would call a "cell" of revolutionaries. The gentleman may have been a member of a cadre but he cannot have been a cadre by himself.

Yours faithfully,

                                                                                         Peter Evans

In days gone by we had lessons in English grammar and we did exercises in collective nouns. Nowadays, schooling is so patchy that many of us pick up our English on the hoof. Collectives group elements into a set, either explicitly (a pride of lions, an observance of hermits) or implicitly (team, government, audience).

Bog-standardly, when one is thinking of the group as a unit it behaves as a singular noun because the group is conceived of as one entity.

The government is sitting. (It doesn't mean they have only one rump.)

My flock of sheep has gone astray. (As Bo Peep might say, given that the component sheep often go off en masse.)

Where is my team? (phone-call to the bus company with dodgy navigation.)

Things are slightly complicated by a singular-to-plural metonymic shift- peculiar, by and large, to English-where we use the collective noun but have in mind the members of the group. This should not be thought of as being on the same footing as the above bog-standard rule, but as a development of it.

The team are going to their homes after the match.
(Here we are thinking of the members of the team each going to his or her separate domicile. If you were to say "The team is going to its home after the match" it would suggest they all lived under one roof.)

The government are doing well.

This usage often sounds weird to foreign speakers of English when they first rub up against it because of the singular noun and plural verb.

There are cases when the plurality of the complement tips the balance quite solidly in favour of a plural. For example, it would grate on the sensitive ear to have to metabolise:

My family is farmers.

We say instead:

My family are farmers.

Note: for those who dislike cognitive dissonance, all ambiguity can usually be removed by expanding the phrase to refer explicitly to its components: "members of the government" , or "the members of my Physics class", or changing to the elements of the class rather than the class (My sheep are lost.)

One thing, however, you may not do is refer to a member of a group as if the member were the group. This is because, unlike in maths, sets have to have more than one member to justify their linguistic existence. That is, collectives start from couples or indefinite numbers:

The happy couple has arrived. (singular)

The couple do not meet each other until the ceremony.

And notice the difference in meaning between:

The couple were fighting all the way through the ceremony. (sc. each other)

The couple was fighting all the way through the ceremony. (sc. other people)

An exception to this rule about groups of less than two are found in explicit jokes: "He wants to form a government of one."- (Ha Ha!) "A club with no members".

The use of collectives requires making choices which means rule-bound users often fail to be sensitive to the nuances involved, and Pedanticus's postbag bulges with such errors..

I have here sketched in only a few details about collectives, but enough, I hope, for you to realise why the usage referred to in the reader's letter above is uncomfortable, or as we used to say, "wrong"!