British grammar traditionally refers to companies in the plural form (e.g. Apple are releasing the iPad 3 this year), but the American style, where companies are referred to in the singular form (e.g. Apple is releasing the iPad 3 this year) is also acceptable in Britain.

The article you linked to is, I think, a little misguided. If I heard "the government are killing people" I'd assume it meant "the people who make up the government have collectively decided to kill people", which is really no different to "the government is killing people". The collective decision of a group is the individual decision of the entity that group represents.

Thanks. I came here just to bitch about pedantic plural company verb usage on HN. As an American, it's nice to know I can be proud that we've got this usage sounding right.

Do you have a source? Wikipedia seems to agree with mine:

>In [British English], collective nouns can take either singular (formal agreement) or plural (notional agreement) verb forms, according to whether the emphasis is on the body as a whole or on the individual members respectively; compare 'a committee was appointed' with 'the committee were unable to agree'.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_and_British_English_di...

Wikipedia is correct, but that doesn't contradict my point. The actions of a company are the actions of its employees. If I say "Apple is stealing", then I mean that there are some people inside Apple who have decided to steal, so it's equally correct to say "Apple are stealing". The plural form emphasises the responsibility of the individuals, but that's not incorrect, as people don't (well, shouldn't) get a free pass just because they're acting on behalf of a corporation.

But do you really think whoever wrote the headline meant to emphasize the responsibility of the individuals? Isn't much more likely that they just used the plural verb after a company name out of habit?

I think it doesn't matter in this context. Apple doing X is the same as the individuals in Apple doing X. Whatever the author meant, it's still grammatically correct.

Perhaps the difference in style is due to the legal status of corporations as persons in the US. In any event, "Apple is a thieving bastard" does not quite work.

Huh? I'm pretty sure that the British corporations work the same way as US, since personhood is pretty much the defining aspect of a corporation. If I want a licence to make ARM processors I would go to some person who "ARM Holdings plc" has authorized to act on said corporation's behalf. Then I would sign a contract with "ARM Holdings plc". And even if the person I signed the contract with left the company, or the president of ARM went to work somewhere else, or even all the employees and all the shareholders were replaced my contract with "ARM Holdings plc" would still be valid. Likewise there's no one person who can just sell off all of ARM's assets if they feel like it.

This is how most of the world does it, as far as I can tell, though in traditional Islamic law you only had business partnerships that dissolved if any of the members left.

There are various arguments against having authority reside in abstract entities rather than real people, but I hope you can see how it can be good in the case of democratic governments at least, like the City of London Corportation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_London_Corporation

EDIT: To be more clear, pretty much all businesses are some sort of corporation, even though most people use "Corporation" to refer to publicly traded joint stock corporations. All non-profit organizations are also corporations. Some (but by no means all) municipalities are also legally corporations, but I'm not sure exactly what the distinction between that and other forms is.

EDIT2: Reading some more in Wikipedia, I might be using the word "corporation" too loosely in the above, and there are also plane companies and partnerships that are incorporated entities but not corporations, and have the same sort of legal person hood that corporations do.

When you say "plane companies," are you talking about airplane companies (e.g. Boeing and Airbus) or did you mean to say "plain companies?"

That whole `corporations are persons' thing just means that corporations are entities that can sue and be sued.

In the US, it means significantly more including First and Fourteenth Amendment rights allowing corporations to legally take a more active role in politics than is common in other countries using the popular vote.

corporations are legal entites on their own in the UK aswell…

Corporation are people?

Wow is it really necessary to down vote this? It was a pretty relevant comment on the thread. I know it was flippant, but don't be so serious.