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Friday June 30
The stats are in and here's what drew the most readers this week on nzherald:
1. Church bells ring for Kidman's wedding
2. Doctor's brothel not attracting customers
3. We want to know who killed twins too, says family
[audio report]
4. Price of houses will drop, says Reserve Bank head
5. Police officers 'seriously assaulted' in Henderson
- - - posted 1.27pm by Neil Sanderson
Reader comment: It is ironic that on the page in today's paper (pC4) where there is an article on the effect texting is having on the English language there are examples of incorrect grammar by the Herald. On both pC4 and pC5 there are examples of the incorrect use of "its" eg Peter Griffins's piece on the Nintendo DS Lite where the first sentence uses "it's" instead of "its" and again in Georgina Bond's article opposite, the third sentence repeats the error. Was the business sub having a bad day?
I have also noticed a slippage in the rule about the agreement of subject and verb with regards to collective nouns. Normally the word "family" for example takes the singular eg "The family goes on holiday." On several occasions recently the Herald has used the plural. Is this a new decision? eg Family wake to nightmare attack (headline 25 May 2006) eg Family support son in firearm case (Headline 20 May 2006)
I think we have now all accepted the Herald's use of the plural with "team" but please don't let the slippage occur with other collective nouns.
- - - posted by Allison
Response: Thanks for pointing out the rogue aprostrophes Allison. We've removed them from the online versions of those stories.
As for collective nouns, I share your view that collective subjects ought to take singular verbs, but there are many New Zealanders who would disagree. I've even heard the plural verb used when the subject is indisputably singular, e.g. "The visit by the leaders are scheduled for next week".
The Herald's official style is to use plural verbs with all sport teams, e.g. The All Blacksare..., The Sting are... and we try to follow that in the online edition.
Beyond that, I think our approach at nzherald.co.nz probably reflects what's heard on the street - a bit of both.
- - - posted 10.30am by Neil Sanderson
Thursday June 29
Unplugged:
The worst part of discovering that we had no broadband connection from home last evening was the realisation that I was going to have to ring Telecom. I would then have to explain the problem to half a dozen people who would each try to convince me that there was a problem with my computer. I've been down that road a couple of times before. In both cases the problem was an unplugged cable at the Telecom exchange, but trying to convince the phone company that you don't need to change your PC's "IP config" isn't easy.
Last evening though, it only took about 10 minutes before someone answered the Xtra helpline and straight away acknowledged that all ADSL users in the Auckland region had been offline for about an hour. So I could stop crawling under the desk to reboot the modem.
