[Ads-l] [Non-DoD Source] Re: The United States Is/Are

[MULLINS, WILLIAM D (Bill) CIV USARMY RDECOM AMRDEC (US)]

Thanks. Ben.  Shelby Foote was usually pretty reliable, but I suppose that the anecdote was too good to pass up for Burns's film.



________________________________________
From: American Dialect Society [ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] on behalf of Ben Zimmer [bgzimmer at GMAIL.COM]
Sent: Wednesday, August 10, 2016 4:01 PM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject:  Re: The United States Is/Are



I've written about this canard on Language Log in '05 and for my Word
Routes column in '09.

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/myl/languagelog/archives/002663.html
http://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/wordroutes/the-united-states-is-or-are/

Mark Liberman covered it from different angles on Language Log in '09.

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1794
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1798

And I touched on it one more time in a 2013 post (with a Google Ngrams
graph).

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4979


On Wed, Aug 10, 2016 at 4:27 PM, Bill Mullins <amcombill at hotmail.com> wrote:

> I've heard many times that before the Civil War, the usual phrase was "the
> United States are", and after, it was "the United States is".  The United
> States went from a plural noun to a singular one.
>
> Does anyone know where this originated?  Have any of you tried to prove or
> disprove it?  (Too many databases ignore "is" and "are" to make it easy to
> check.)
>
>

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