Posts by linger
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Hard News: The Police Ten 7 State, in reply to Alfie,
Ditto. While Police can be a collective noun, expressions like “Police has” just sounds silly, as nobody speaks that way in the real world.
Or even writes that way.
The Wellington Corpus of Written NZ English contains 41 tokens of police with potentially variable verb agreement. All have plural verbs (even in a text sampling an official history of the NZ Police).
The only examples of singular verbs occurring near police have agreement determined by other head nouns, e.g.
(1) the Police Association faces mounting anger (A01 008);
(2) The original police patrol was called (A25 057);
(3) the Police Force was established in 1886 (F30 006).
Not even these examples are invariably singular, e.g.
(4) the police administration were giving training a high priority (F30 050)Though of course it is not for its language choices so much as for its overreaching content that this contract should be attacked.
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Legal Beagle: Voting in the Flag Referendum, in reply to Sofie Bribiesca,
That would account for the white streak down the middle of the design.
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parachuted in to head
the party of the effluent
squatting over us,
his ethics and his bowels relaxed.
(Why should Colin Craig have a monopoly on shit poetry?) -
Hard News: Dirty Politics, in reply to Alfie,
There's only one of Colin, true,
But one's too many, not too few.
Wise owl? Rather, a twit to woo. -
“If anything’s repeated often enough"… it becomes normal usage, and possibly also perceived (if not actual) truth.
Unintended consequence: It’s fascinating the way “relaxed” is now understood as “slack” in an ever-increasing range of contexts through its repetition by certain especially relaxed politicians.
(Why do we have relaxed oversight, but stricter surveillance?)
Even so, it seems unlikely any amount of repetition will convince NZers that Lomu Almighty wanted a change of flag to fit Our Relaxed Leader’s infernal preference.
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Polity: A hazy, intriguing crystal ball, in reply to chris,
We do have a climate change thread open, so I’ve moved my response (a link to a current BBC Radio 4 series which has an episode on solutions to climate change) over there.
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Changing Climate (BBC Radio 4)
In this three part series Roger Harrabin examines the science, politics and solutions of climate.
Interview transcripts are available from the Open University website.
Links to each episode
(Like most BBC radio science content, these should be available to stream indefinitely; but there doesn't seem to be a downloadable podcast for this series.)
Episode 1: The Science (2015/11/16)
Episode 2: The Solutions (2015/11/23)
Episode 3: The Politics (2015/11/30) -
Legal Beagle: Voting in the Flag Referendum, in reply to izogi,
the best way to replace the government is to provide a decent alternative
Very true. But for most of us here, it’s a lot easier to slag off Key (and to note that his personal popularity derives at least in part from using every advertising trick in the book) than it is to create a perception of the opposition as competent. (Especially frustrating when National are demonstrably not functioning any better than any possible alternative.)
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Legal Beagle: Voting in the Flag Referendum, in reply to izogi,
What you’re saying there is,
the associative logic of advertising doesn’t work,
because we’re all too smart for it. … Yeah, right. -
Hard News: The Message, in reply to Ethan Tucker,
Flaming nutbar: boom, Whittaker’s next chocolate range.
That has serious possibilities. Chilli almond. Sweet and sour cashew. Satay...