When someone from Britain speaks, Americans hear a "British accent"...

[Steve Horsley]

Steve Holden wrote:
> Then again, there's room for infinite disagreement about these topics. I 
> mentioned a while ago that I disliked the English on a bumper sticker I 
> liked, which read
> 
> "Some village in Texas is missing their idiot".
> 
> Several people defended this, saying that a village could use the plural 
> possessive "their". I personally found it odd (and essentially 
> non-grammatical) not because either the singular or plural forms should 
> be mandated but because this one manages to mix them up. So
> 
> "Some village in Texas are missing their idiot"
> 
> would be better (though it sounds like the kind of thing only the idiot 
> alluded to would say), while my preferred choice would be
> 
> "Some village in Texas is missing its idiot".
> 

Strangely, the one that scans most naturally to me is the first 
one. Maybe its because the sentence starts by talking of a 
village in Texas singular point on a map, but the idiot in the 
second half is one of many inhabitants who have noticed his 
absence. Yes, it is mixing singular and plural from a syntactic 
point of view, but not so badly after interepretation into mental 
images.

The one that always makes me grit my teeth is "You have got to, 
don't you?". Well no, I do NOT got to, actually. Shudder!

Steve, Brung up in norf London.