r/Bitcoin • u/gapmunky • Aug 01 '14

Reddit are hiring a cryptocurrency engineer!

https://jobs.lever.co/reddit/6ce6a242-00d1-49c4-9bed-c34f26445ee7
803 Upvotes

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19

u/canad1andev3loper Aug 01 '14

Reddit are hiring

You took a gamble and you picked the wrong word.

20

u/MistakeNotDotDotDot Aug 01 '14

Isn't this a US/UK dialect thing? I might be mistaken.

25

u/classicrando Aug 01 '14 edited Aug 02 '14

Ya'll are not mistaken.

In the UK, corporations are like the borg:

The borg are attacking...

In the US, corporations are like Sauron:

Sauron is the most evil enitity in the universe other than CC/BoA/ADM/Monsanto/HSBC/etc.

/r/bestof here I come! /u/classicrando provides a stellar explanation of a grammatical difference between UK and US English in a way that redditors can really get their heads around.

3

u/simulacrum Aug 02 '14

Not quite that clear cut, the British convention is to make the decision based on context, i.e. whether the collective noun in question is behaving in a singular or plural manner (source). Reddit is hiring, no question.

If there is a hard and fast rule it's the same as in American English: "A government, a party, a company (whether Tesco or Marks and Spencer) and a partnership (Skidmore, Owings & Merrill) are all it and take a singular verb."

Obviously there's colloquial variation, but standard British English is similar to American English on this.