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Grammar question

When referring to sports teams, I have noticed an apparent inconsistency:

A person will write, "The Dolphins are a bad team." But they will also write, "Miami is a bad team." Those two statements refer to the same entity. The "Miami Dolphins" would definitely be considered plural, yet Miami is considered singluar. Is that the correct way to write these statements?

Also, what about the Miami Heat? Would you write, "The Heat are coached by Pat Riley," or "The Heat is coached by Pat Riley."? (And for that matter, where should that question mark go?) Heat is singular, but it is used exactly like Dolphins or Hurricanes.

The question mark goes inside the quotes. Just like a full stop or a comma. It looks odd, but still. (In any case, a full stop, followed by closing quotes and a question mark is wrong.) It seems obvious to place the question mark outside the quotes.

As for the singular/plural issue, I think the fact that a team is a singular subject makes it possible to say "The Heat is coached by Pat Riley." The underlying notion is singular, "a team". You can't say "The police is here." because "the police" does not refer to a singular entity. But you can say, "The Police is here," when referring to the band The Police (at least, I think you can). Again, underlying notion is that of a single entity, "a band".

"Dolphins" is plural, "Miami" is singular, and it's used as a collective noun so 'is' would be correct.

It's not only IS and ARE. "The Dolphins 'have' a bad team," and "Miami 'has' a bad team.'

Police and People are exceptions to the rule.

I think the British prefer ARE when using collective nouns, but I won't get into that.

Quote:

Originally Posted by roboshark

I hate to mention it, but you broke your own punctuation rule several times in the second paragraph. Anyway, I follow "logical quoting" rules (reference):

Quote:

Hackers tend to use quotes as balanced delimiters like parentheses, much to the dismay of American editors. Thus, if "Jim is going" is a phrase, and so are "Bill runs" and "Spock groks", then hackers generally prefer to write: "Jim is going", "Bill runs", and "Spock groks". This is incorrect according to standard American usage (which would put the continuation commas and the final period inside the string quotes); however, it is counter-intuitive to hackers to mutilate literal strings with characters that don't belong in them. Given the sorts of examples that can come up in discussions of programming, American-style quoting can even be grossly misleading. When communicating command lines or small pieces of code, extra characters can be a real pain in the neck.

Consider, for example, a sentence in a vi tutorial that looks like this:

Then delete a line from the file by typing "dd".

Standard usage would make this

Then delete a line from the file by typing "dd."

but that would be very bad -- because the reader would be prone to type the string d-d-dot, and it happens that in `vi(1)' dot repeats the last command accepted. The net result would be to delete *two* lines!

The Jargon File follows hackish usage throughout.

Interestingly, a similar style is now preferred practice in Great Britain, though the older style (which became established for typographical reasons having to do with the aesthetics of comma and quotes in typeset text) is still accepted there. "Hart's Rules" and the "Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors" call the hacker-like style `new' or `logical' quoting.

In American English the verb agrees with the noun itself (e.g., "Miami is ... . "The Dolphins are ... .). In British English all collective nouns use the plural form of the verb, thus they would, indeed, say "The Heat are coached by Pat Riley."

This will blow your mind...what if it was the Denver Deer? The Milwaukee Moose? The Florida Fish? (I guess that's why they're the Marlins.)

Dude, you just blew my mind...

Thanks for the answers, all. I guess the way we are used to hearing/reading it is the right way after all.

Quote:

Originally Posted by 2aida

In most media around Detroit, the latter is the rule followed (Detroit Free Press, Detroit News). Also, one could logically and correctly say either,

"Miami has a bad team this year"

-or-

"Miami is a bad team this year"

depending on whether or not they are referencing the team or the locale.

According to my english professor, the question mark goes inside of quotation marks if it's part of the quote, but if you're asking a question about the quote, it goes outside. The same is true for any punctuation other than a period or comma.

Quote:

Originally Posted by MrSelfDestruct

I agree with MrSelfDestruct, and this is the most intuitive answer.

However, there is not universal agreement on this one.

Mr Mephisto

Quote:

Originally Posted by Mr Mephisto

I agree with MrSelfDestruct, and this is the most intuitive answer.

However, there is not universal agreement on this one.

Mr Mephisto

I agree that there is not universal agreement on this point. Computer users, and espcially programmers, have a hard time putting punctuation inside quotation marks that does not explicitly exist in the quote. This is slowly becoming an accepted alternative punctuation structure, espcially for technical writing, although I believe it is still considered incorrect formally.

If there are many things covered under a singular noun, it is called a collective. You treat collectives as singular nouns, such as the word "family." Soort teams are always collective; i.e. The Bengals are kicking the Broncos' asses right now, no, wait, they just won. (they really did win in the midst of writing my sentence). The Heat are awesome this year.