Collective nouns

[Joel S. Berson]

At 9/17/2010 04:28 PM, Laurence Horn wrote:
>"(the) Pack" is of
>course headlinese for "the Packers", which would obligatorily govern
>the plural, so that might make "the Pack have" rather than
>"has...work to do" even more likely.

Here of course it was the NC Wolfpack, not the Green Bay
Packers.  But still headlinese (and the quote is from a headline)
that omits the "the" seems not uncommon, or at least may have its
reasons, and I would not cringe at a sentence reading "The Wolfpack have ..."

Joel

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org