Jesse Ventura hit the airwaves of Washington in recent days. Listening to one of his interviews, I was struck by how articulate a speaker he is, with little hesitation, few ums, likes, and I means. He’s direct, knows what he wants to say, and says it with clarity. Perhaps that’s because, as he says, wrestling taught him to think quickly on his feet, something that carried over to his political career as the Independent governor of Minnesota.

So, being impressed with his speaking style, I grimaced just a bit when he said, “If you allow the third party equal footing, they can be successful.”

The use of they when referring to a single entity such as an organization, corporation, government, or, in this case, a political party is something I hear frequently on the radio, spoken by commentators and reporters as well as by those being interviewed. It’s also a grammatical error I find myself correcting more and more in proofs of articles to be printed in National Geographic, and that’s usually after writer and editor have spent some time on the text.

The Brits, of course, have long used plural verbs with an entity comprised of individuals (“the government have instituted new procedures”), and it could be argued from the modern “notional” approach to grammar that a plural pronoun is acceptable because the single entity is made up of individuals.

I am not convinced by notional grammar in this particular structure, though apparently I don’t always persuade National Geographic editors and writers to follow me down the strict path of structural agreement (see, there’s a degree of wrestling in my work too!).

Here are two examples of pronoun and antecedent not agreeing. The first was corrected before publication in National Geographic; the second was not.

            • The crew was freed. Later, they were stunned when investigators revealed
               that one of their own had betrayed them.

            • That fall, Lishui [a city] applied to add another 13.5 square miles to the
              development zone. The expansion would require an investment of almost
              900 million dollars, most of which would come from bank loans. They planned
              to double the city’s population by 2020.

Jesse seems to be in good company. 

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