Re: Question about plurals.

Einde O'Callaghan wrote:

Virtually all nouns that refer to groups behave in this way. Take for example the word "company": "Our company is based in the South-west of England. We supply high-quality widgets to the widget-processing industry."

That's a poor example, as the "we" refers back to the group of people represented by "our". But the core is true. You'll hear "The majority are" more often than "is" and "The RAF were bombing Berlin", not "was". But always "a mob was burning and looting". There may be a principle to be distilled from all this, but I doubt it.

JS
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