ELVIS COSTELLO shares some of the blame. "Oliver's Army is here to stay," he sang a generation ago, in the chorus of one of his catchier numbers. Then, before you could blink, he added: "Oliver's Army are on their way."
Make up your mind, Elvis, I remember thinking, as I studied grammar for my Leaving Cert English exam. Even allowing that the army had mounted a major recruitment campaign between the first and second lines, there seemed no good reason for it to change from a singular entity to a plural one in so short a time.
But it did, thereby penetrating the language's defences at a weak point. Oliver's army has/have since poured through the line, sowing confusion in its/their wake. The result, nearly 30 years on, is that nobody seems to know whether anything is single or plural any more.
All right, I'm not seriously blaming Elvis Costello. Disregard for the rules of English is a long and honourable tradition in rock music. And if he didn't do it deliberately, he was probably just reflecting a habit that already existed.
But the virus has certainly reached epidemic proportions in recent times, even among groups who are supposed to be broadly on the side of rules (eg journalists). These days, entities mentioned in news reports can change numerical properties as often as Kylie Minogue changes costume. It's not unusual for even the Government to go from being singular to plural, and sometimes back again, all in the intro to a news story.
Perhaps it was the rise of coalitions that did it, but there is constant confusion in this country now over whether the Cabinet "has" or "have" announced something; whether the announcement is in keeping with "its" or "their" election manifesto; and whether the opposition "is" or "are" united in saying that the move is ham-fisted and doomed to failure.
Speaking of united, sports journalism definitely shares some of the blame for the situation, thanks to its reluctance ever to treat a team as a single entity.
It can be jarring to read a US newspaper writing about European soccer, with sentences such as: "Liverpool is through to the Champions League final, after beating its rival Chelsea". But this only highlights how insistent sports writers on this side of the Atlantic are on the plurality of every football club.
Over on the finance pages, where its share price might be under discussion, the club will probably be singular. And its singularity will continue into the news pages if, say, it features in a criminal investigation. On the sports pages, however, the team will almost always be plural - even when the reporter is commenting on how good a job the manager has done in "moulding them into a unit".
Of course, political correctness has also played a part in the single-plural confusion. You know the problem. In conversation or in writing, we frequently start sentences with gender-neutral but singular subjects, and proceed confidently until we reach the pronoun, where assurance deserts us.
Suddenly it is as though we are faced with the entrance to a public toilet. Before we go any further, we must choose between "his" and "hers". And to avoid the embarrassment of having to go back and investigate the subject's gender, we frequently resort to that that appalling unisex solution "their" - even though we have distinctly suggested already that the subject was singular.
Take an example you hear every day. Time was, it would have been perfectly acceptable for that man who does the Eircom phone voice-overs to say that the mobile phone owner you are calling may be out of coverage "or have his unit powered off". (Time was, indeed, the person would just have had his unit "switched off". But that's a separate issue.)
The use of "his" would not have implied anything about the gender of the person in question; or - in the event that she was a woman - cast aspersions on her lifestyle. But somehow, it became unacceptable for "his" to embrace "her". Meanwhile, using both is still considered fussy. So if they have to offend any group, Eircom and many others prefer to offend people who worry about correct English, by foisting plurality on what was previously an individual. At least Oliver's Army had some excuse.
If we need a gender-neutral pronoun, surely "its" would be better. At the risk of sounding odd, "the person you are calling may have its unit powered off" at least avoids the implication that your friend has a split personality. That said, the word "its" may not be in a position to take on extra work at this time. It has enough problems rebuffing the advances of redundant apostrophes, God knows.
Speaking of God, the Christian religions have held the line well on the single/plural issue, despite what would appear to be an underlying vulnerability.
Most of them believe, after all, that there are three persons in one God. But I have yet to hear any of them claim that: "God are great". On the question of whose will is to be done, likewise, they all still agree it should be "His". Not even the trendiest of Anglican vicars has yet come out in favour of doing "their will", although this will probably happen before long.
fmcnally@irish-times.ie