Today, the mailman (and in my neighborhood he is a man) delivered a confirmation that the Orange County Board of Education has graciously agreed to allow my son, Carter, to return to the only school he has ever known.
Here is the full text of the letter:
April 8, 2008
To the Parents/Guardian of Aidan Scott,
At their regularly scheduled meeting on April 7, 2008, the Orange County Board of Education approved the Hillsborough Elementary School Student Selection Plan for the 2008-2009 school year.
Under this plan, Aidan Scott will be enrolled in 3rd Grade at Hillsborough Elementary School for the next school year. Ms. Horner, Principal of Hillsborough Elementary School, will be sending out information packets to the families of all enrolled students in the near future. If your child is enrolling for Kindergarten, please note that Kindergarten registration will be held on April 30th at 8:30 a.m. and 10:30 a.m. Please call 732-6137 to register.
Thank you for your continued support of Orange County Schools.
Sincerely,
Michael J. Gilbert
Public Information Officer
Orange County Schools
If you, or someone you know, received a rejection letter, I would be very interested in posting its text. Of course I would edit out their child's name before publishing it.
[For bonus points: Who can identify the grammar error in the first sentence of this letter?]
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6 comments:
The pronoun their is not correct to refer to the Board of Eduation as a noun.
The bonus points go to Anonymous - 5:15.
Doesn't this depend on the interpretation? If I interpret "the Board" as "people", then the grammar is correct.
No, it does not depend on the interpretation. When you refer to a group acting together as a unit, you must use a singular pronoun.
Corrected sentence:
At its regularly scheduled meeting on April 7, 2008 the Orange County Board of Education....
The singular subject "board" now agrees with the singular pronoun "its"
If you made the subject plural, it would correctly read:
At their regularly scheduled meeting on April 7, 2008 the members of the Orange County Board of Education....
The plural pronoun "their" agrees with the plural subject "members."
"their" is ok in this instance. Since Mr. Gilbert was referring to two separate groups: the normal board members and Liz. Hence, the plurality is ok.
Liz's behavior should not be tolerated. She's nothing more than a bully that cries when she doesn't get her way.
BTW Liz, GO PRINCETON TIGERS!!!
I had to go read up on this. My grammar is rusty for sure, but I remember that the rules of subject and verb agreement weren't cut and dry.
Here's a link to the relevant section of the American Heritage Book of English Usage:
http://www.bartleby.com/64/C001/060.html
There it speaks of 2 types of agreement -- grammatical and notional -- and the one I had in mind was notional agreement.
Here's the section on notional agreement:
notional agreement. It would be great if this was all there was to remember, but there is more than one kind of agreement. There is grammatical agreement, as discussed above, and agreement in meaning, or notional agreement. Usually grammatical agreement and notional agreement coincide. In the sentence He laughs, both are singular. In the sentence We laugh, both are plural. But in some sentences a subject can have a singular form and a plural meaning. Thus in the sentence Her family are all avid skiers, the noun family is singular in form but plural in meaning, and the verb is plural to agree with the meaning. In other words, there is notional agreement, but not grammatical agreement, between the subject and the verb. In the sentence Everyone has gone to the movies, the situation is reversed. The subject everyone is plural in meaning and singular in form, but the verb agrees in number with the form of its grammatical subject. There is grammatical agreement but not notional agreement.
Similarly, there are some nouns like mumps and news that are plural in form but take a singular verb: The mumps was once a common childhood disease. Amounts often take a singular verb: Ten thousand bucks is a lot of money. Here again we have notional, but not grammatical, agreement—the ten thousand bucks is considered a single quantity, and it gets a singular verb.
There are a number of words in English that can take a singular or plural verb depending on how they are used. Among these are collective nouns, pronouns such as any and none, and many nouns ending in -ics, such as politics.
So again, I think it depends on your interpretation. The last post jokingly (well, maybe not) referred to the Board as 2 separate groups of people. In that case, "their" would be ok for notional agreement.
For the record, I'm not arguing for one answer or the other, but that there may be more than one correct answer.
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