Yep, i admit to interchanging the use of 'is' and 'are' at times when describing a collective that make an actual single entity. Usually dependent on the overall thing being talked about. Used to give me sleepless nights worrying about how to apply a possessive term to The Doors
It actually (and i know some won't believe that i really am saying this
)
doesn't really matter which way it's used as long as the intended message is clear - and that applies to various uses of punctuation, abbreviations, etc. I've been won over by incredibly 'grammatically correct' people, including Stephen Fry, and Suzie Dent of the Oxford English Dictionary, that language is fluid and 'correct' only applies to our own context. Literary scholars of hundreds of years ago would be just as horrified at our ravaged version of language. As long as a sentence isn't ambiguous to the point of causing any danger by not being understandable (which isn't too many places), then it doesn't generally matter too much.
I no longer worry about the position of apostrophes (although i still like to look out for them at the market), the abbreviation of text speak (txt spk) or whether my team should be playing at St James, St Jameses, St James's or St James' Park. (Someone's stolen the real me
)
To get back on the topic, i've heard so many people using the term fag for cigarette on our TV, radio and in general chat over the last couple of weeks - since someone on here thought it was a stupid outdated term to use (i think it was a even a brit who commented on it).
