With all this talk about birthdays and such, and just to show how ancient I’m becoming, back in 7th grade (or thereabouts) I recall the teacher bringing in a big glossy cigarette ad from the Sunday paper (and the youngs folks say “but, cigarettes don’t advertise in the paper!”**) and conducting a lesson based on the (grammatically faulty) catch-phrase “Winston tastes good, like a cigarette should”

**I think one short-term stimulous package the government could grant the printed-newspaper industry would be to grant them the a waiver, so that they could accept advertising from the big tobacco companies. The money would begin arriving in armored trucks

But in American English, collective nouns are generally treated as singular–in formal prose, if not in everyday speech. Example: The family next door is from China. Here’s a one-page lesson on what to do when re collective nouns.

In British English, collective nouns are generally treated as plural. Example: The government have issued a new policy. Here’s a one-paragraph usage note that sums it all up nicely.

Hope you had a perfect day, Moe, on your birthday. Many more.

Heidi Klum was on with Kimmel. I have only seen his show a few times for a few minutes, but tonight it was time to pause and watch a little bit. She just had her fourth child six weeks ago and she attributes her good conditioning to constant exercise from chasing kids around. Her plan is working.

I suppose it’s my academic background, but I’m used to thinking of “department” as a collective noun for a group of people, and thus would find “their” to be perfectly acceptable.

Yes that was in the movie Sneakers, but when I saw that Sneakers I felt like I had seen something like that somewhere before, and it was geese the first time. It was a long time ago, I may have been in high school (in the 60s), and I thought it may have been a Hitchcock movie? For some reason I keep picturing Gregory Peck as the one who was kidnapped and blindfolded. But I must be misremembering again.