A commenter, commenting on my “Thanks to Attorney.org for its kind words about our blog,” asks:
Unless one is British, would not the proper response be “Thanks to Attorney.org for its kind words about our blog, which it labeled its Blog of the Year”?Or did I miss a revolution with respect to it (its) and they (their)?
I’m not sure there was a revolution, in the sense of a change in practice. But my sense is that current practice (whether or not it departs from past practice) is generally to treat organizations as a “they” rather than an “it” in thanks, perhaps because thanks naturally flow to humans rather than to entities. A few quick searches for “thanks to x for their” and “... for its” (with x being, for instance, Google, U2, and Exxon) suggest that “for their” is considerably more common, except, oddly enough, when x was UCLA (why is that?).
Unless I’m mistaken, this is a special case of what is called notional agreement. Alternatively, one can see it as an instance of ellipsis, in which “Thanks to x” is understood to mean “Thanks to the people at x.” But in any case, my sense is that treating the thanked entity as a plural group of people rather than as a singular organization, and thus using “their” instead of “its,” is indeed standard usage, though the opposite approach is standard, too (though apparently somewhat rarer).
Dale Gribble says:
Professor Eugene, you waste your talents on teaching law, English is the field for you!
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November 18, 2009, 10:15 amNutter says:
I’ve never liked the cyclic reasoning of the paradigm that if an otherwise incorrect use of grammar or spelling becomes widespread, it is declared to be henceforth correct.
If you want to use “they” in this context, then rephrase it as “I would like to thank the editors at Attorney.org for their kind words...” or “to thank the members of Attorney.org...” Otherwise Attorney.org is a singular noun.
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November 18, 2009, 10:20 amcirby says:
“Thanks to the people at Attorney.org for their...”
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November 18, 2009, 10:20 amdearieme says:
I Britishly recommend:-
“Thanks to Attorney.org for its kind words about our blog, which it labelled its Blog of the Year”
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November 18, 2009, 10:23 amLaura(southernxyl) says:
I’m always thrilled when statements like that have internal consistency, regardless of which way they go. “Sears is having their annual blah blah sale” sends chills down my spine. Pick one or the other.
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November 18, 2009, 10:47 amDavid Schwartz says:
I think it’s pretty clear that neither is incorrect. I also think there’s a different ‘feel’ to the two. Using ‘its’ treats the organization as an entity capable of acting as its own. Using ‘their’ treats the organization more as a means of organizing the actions of its members.
I would suspect that the larger, more formal, and more bureaucratic the organization, the more frequently you would see “its”. An exception will likely be organizations that by their name suggest a group of people. For example, “X Committee for its” is less common than “X Committee for their” because the word “committee” strongly reminds us that it’s a group of people. (And same for “group for its/their”.)
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November 18, 2009, 10:47 amjss says:
The only rule of grammar to remember is, “when 2 vowels go walking, the first one does the talking”.
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November 18, 2009, 10:57 amSplunge says:
Well it could be worse. I hazard that in 50 years the sex sensitivities of the colloquial speaker will have caused the formal replacement of the generic singular pronoun (he) with the plural pronoun (they), which is safely without gender. Already constructions like these are ubiquitous among high-school age writers, and sanctioned by their teachers:
Everyone must choose their own path.
Each student selects their thesis topic.
Note in the second example the jarring (I hope!) juxtaposition of the singular verb with the plural pronoun. This is the future.
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November 18, 2009, 11:04 amDoc Merlin says:
Organizations in general are singular in American English and plural in British English.
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November 18, 2009, 11:05 amsitzpinkler says:
Its. Its. Its.
P.S. Its.
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November 18, 2009, 11:06 amsitzpinkler says:
Silence. If you keep saying things like that, the Gender Neutral Pronoun Brigade will add another rule to its book.
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November 18, 2009, 11:09 amSnaphappy says:
Oh yes, it’s quite common to read, “The Supreme Court handed down their opinion in...” Standard usage, much more common than “The Supreme Court handed down its opinion in ...”
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November 18, 2009, 11:34 amgreg says:
The folks over at Language Log have dealt with the use of singular they several times now.
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November 18, 2009, 12:00 pmEugene Volokh says:
Sitzpinkler is being snarky.
Snaphappy: I’m speaking here of the usage in thanking (and the evidence from my quick and dirty queries on the subject), and not of the usage in broader references to the actions of entities.
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November 18, 2009, 12:20 pmInkmiser says:
The problem is not with the pronoun, but with the antecedent. If the speaker is thanking the people, then he should thank the people, not the organization. The sentence shows that the speaker isn’t really sure who he is thanking. The error (if you view the lack of agreement as one) is with the choice of the object. The pronoun choice merely reveals the error in thought.
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November 18, 2009, 1:27 pmJules Bernard says:
English isn’t math. It’s a language, with idioms and idiosyncrasies and variations and general messiness. You can look to rules for help, but rules only go so far. You either speak the language like a native or you don’t.
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November 18, 2009, 1:49 pmNot My Leg says:
Interesting, I am surprised that ‘their’ wins out by a large margin. “Thanks to Exxon for their...” sounds wrong to me. Although not as wrong as *“Exxon are drilling new oil wells” which sounds entirely unacceptable to me.(I know that Professor Volokh is talking about only the first construction.)
A quick google search for Exxon reveals the in general the “Exxon is” construction is more common, with 62,000 hits to 42,000, and only one (or two) of the hits on the first page for “Exxon are” is actually relevant. The others are things like “X and Exxon are” or “Dealers who deal with Exxon are”, or the borderline “They (Exxon) are[.]”
I think there is strong evidence that “[Organization] are” is non-standard, perhaps so much so as to be incorrect. But apparently also strong evidence for “Thanks to [Organization] for their...” as standard, and probably more common than “for its...” I can see two explanations. First explanation, language is inconsistent. There is nothing inherently wrong with a plural construction being required in one context, and allowing choice in the other. That is just how language works sometimes. Language isn’t logic.
Second explanation; this is not switching from plural to singular in different constructions, it is just use of singular they. In the construction “Thanks to [organization] for their...” their is not referring to the organization as a plural, but is referring to it as a singular. This is pretty standard in English, and a natural shift from using they to refer to a singular person where gender is unknown or necessarily general (and it is inappropriate) to substituting they for it (their for its). The reason we don’t see this in “Exxon are” is because there is no equivalent to the substitution of singular they when talking about verbs. If Exxon is a singular noun it will take is as its verb, not are. If we then shift to using they to refer to Exxon (as in the borderline case above) we necessarily shift to using ‘are’ because *“They is” is nonstandard and very marked speech.
Of course, my evidence for “[organization] are” being non-standard is based on very brief research, and someone could obviously convince me otherwise.
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November 18, 2009, 2:36 pmPersonFromPorlock says:
How about creating an all purpose pronoun for when meaning is clear from context but grammar is a tossup? “Smish,” maybe.
Thus: “Thanks to [organization] for smish help.” And ““Sears is having smish annual blah blah sale.”
...Sigh. I thought not.
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November 18, 2009, 2:53 pmjbeuks says:
If the verb used with a collective noun is singular (and according to any version of American usage that I’m familiar with, it virtually always is in this situation), shouldn’t the trailing pronoun also be singular? Either “Sears is having its annual sale” or “Sears are having their annual sale,” but not “is ... their,” at least in careful written usage.
The Brits, of course, say “Parliament are ...,” but we say “Congress is ... .”
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November 18, 2009, 3:33 pmdcperson says:
A college professor did this with gender neutral singular pronouns. “Hesh” became the way of avoiding he/she. The professor wouldn’t mark off for not doing it, of course, but it avoided the mess when writing papers.
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November 18, 2009, 4:06 pmSecond Amendment Sister says:
“Thanks to Attorney.org for
itsthe kind words about our blog.”FIFY.
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November 18, 2009, 4:31 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
This is my thought. But in the world of “Egg’s 0.99c/doz” it’s probably a lost cause.
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November 18, 2009, 4:47 pmThat Guy says:
Its. No points for their. It’s, there, and they’re earn immediate removal to the circular file.
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November 18, 2009, 5:10 pmCJColucci says:
For sports teams, the idiomatic way seems to be, e.g., “Dallas is,” “the Cowboys are,” and “the Dallas [or Cowboy] organization is.”
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November 19, 2009, 9:33 amBill Poser says:
In my own usage, institutions take singular agreement; the plural sounds like another dialect, not horribly wrong but not what I would say. It is, however, important to distinguish between institutions and collections of individuals referred to by morphologically singular nouns as for me the latter do take plural agreement. An example is: “The government (of Canada) does not want to demand the repatriation of Omar Ahmed Khadr” vs. “the government have been accused of directing funds to their own constituencies”. In the former case, “government” refers to the institution; in the latter case, it refers to the collection of individuals forming the government, that is, the Prime Minister and his cabinet.
Incidentally, English (in dialects other than my own) is not unique in treating institutions as plural. In Carrier, the native language of much of the central interior of British Columbia, institutions are often treated as human plural, e.g. “lugurma budayi” = “government chief”, where bu– is the third person duo-plural possessive prefix, though they can also be treated as “areal” non-humans (and therefore necessarily singular since only human beings and dogs take plural agreement), e.g. “‘Awhuz UNBC huba ‘int’en eh?” = “Are you still working for UNBC?”, where huba is the postposition “for” inflected for an “areal” object.
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November 19, 2009, 7:26 pm