British Grammar Invades the American World Cup
The World Cup can be enlivening for American English. Every four years, we import some Britishisms. The phrase in abundance during this year’s tournament, especially after a certain controversial red card, has been “a coming together,” which describes an incidental collision, as in, “That’s not a foul, just a coming together.” It’s a practical term. I plan to use it while parallel parking in a tight spot. The British have given us other gifts: “hat trick,” “nutmeg.” There’s “argy-bargy” (a verbal scuffle), “afters” (argy-bargy turned physical), and “handbags” (afters but minor). “Soccer,” despite its contrarian edge, comes by way of England, from university slang for “association football”: “association” became “assoc” became “assoccer” and then “soccer.” You’ve likely encountered the snob who describes a great goal as a “class finish,” but at least the snobbery expands our expressive horizons. In this cultural exchange, America is a winner.
Or are they? With the lexical flourishing has come grammatical rot. I’m referring to the British “are”—the tendency to pluralize, as in, “England are going to blow it.” Before France played Senegal last month, I heard an American remark, “With liberté, égalité, fraternité, and Mbappé, France are once again the heavy favorites.” Often, the “are”s emit from a certain type of liberal, cosmopolitan American soccer fan. (The “France are” utterer in question: Zohran Mamdani.) But these days the “are” is everywhere. It’s on our broadcast, even from the rare American announcer. (In sports commentating, we run a big trade deficit.) It’s at our sports bars and in the Times—often with little consistency. We’ve become plurally confused. When the U.S. lost to Turkey a couple of weeks ago, E.S.P.N.’s website announced:
Also:
Is the Britishification of our soccer grammar a token of graciousness and respect, or is it the wheedling sycophancy of perpetual losers? “Here’s what’s going on grammatically,” Lynne Murphy, a linguist and the author of “The Prodigal Tongue: The Love-Hate Relationship Between American and British English,” told me. “You can either follow the form of the word, which looks singular—‘England’—or you can follow the meaning, and since it’s a team with lots of people in it, you have the choice of treating it as singular or plural.” Words that are formally singular but refer to a group are called collective nouns. Americans tend to treat them as singular. This is called formal agreement. In soccer and in other contexts (government, bands), the British often use the plural. This is called notional agreement. Linguists insist that neither is better or worse; it wouldn’t be wrong for an American to say that our basketball team is good while our soccer team are bad. But that doesn’t mean I have to like it.
Linguistically, as on the pitch, the Americans can often be found ball-chasing. Until the eighteenth century, English everywhere employed notional agreement—“are” not “is.” Since then, both sides have been moving toward formal agreement, with the Americans leading the way. Then, a couple of decades ago, the Brits suddenly reversed. “The British use of ‘are’ has been going up, possibly in reaction to the perception that ‘is’ is the more American way to do it,” Murphy said. A similar backlash has happened with the spelling of the suffix -ize (they now prefer -ise). The language shifts have always been about class and status. To Americans, the Queen’s English sounds sophisticated. To Brits, American English sounds crude. They say “mashed potato”; we say “mashed potatoes.” “Maths,” “math.” If enough Americans were to adopt the “are,” the English would probably go back to “is.”
“We’re a gregarious species,” Grant Barrett, a linguist and lexicographer and co-host of the radio show and podcast “A Way with Words,” told me. “There’s something called accommodation theory that says, We change our speech depending on the groups we’re in to try to fit in.” But it’s a little pathetic when the accommodation goes only one way. The American World Cup has produced some American backlash—an “are” argy-bargy. Among the “is” crowd, there’s a sense that we need to build our own soccer culture. The “are,” in its snobbery, excludes. Also, should we really be emulating a soccer country that is culturally dominant but hasn’t won a major international tournament in sixty years? We’d be better off learning Spanish or French. (Those happen to be formal-agreement languages.) On the podcast “The S* Word,” Will Gavin, a Brit, and Master Tesfatsion, an American, have argued about the “are.” Gavin, who also does play-by-play calls for American football games broadcast on U.K. radio, told me, “When I’m covering the N.F.L., I’m really aware of using the grammar or the language of the sport itself. Otherwise, it’s like commentating on tennis and saying ‘fifteen–nil’ instead of ‘fifteen–love.’ ” Gavin calls it “de-fense” in the N.F.L., and “de-fense” in soccer. But he only accommodates so much. “I will still say ‘are,’ ” he said. “To me, that’s not a language-of-sport thing, that’s a fundamental language truism that I think Americans should adopt when talking about anything.”
Part of the problem is pronouns. A team, singular, is an “it.” That sounds weird. (“It won!”) Americans have a workaround. Our teams have names. Oddly, we use the plural even when the name is singular: Jazz, Heat, Kraken. A notable exception is Stanford—the Cardinal—which is stubbornly singular, forcing people to regularly say, “The Cardinal is losing again.” (Stanford explains that “cardinal” refers not to the bird but to the color. I’m not sure I buy it. The school’s unofficial mascot doesn’t help: it’s a stoned-looking green tree.)
European clubs go without mascots. There are some plural outliers (Go Berner Sport Club Young Boys!), and many have unofficial nicknames (Go Everton Toffees!), but they’re not often used. Without nominal agreement, you’d be stuck with “it.” Many M.L.S. teams follow European naming conventions: D.C. United, Philadelphia Union, New York City F.C. Our linguistic soccer confusion has given us the monstrosity of Real Salt Lake, a team name which somehow conjures both “The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City” and a charter bestowed by a Spanish-speaking monarch. The team name is pronounced, in corrupted Spanglish, not “ray-al” but “ree-al.”
So who are we to take linguistic stands? This is a country whose name could be singular or plural: United States. We used to be an “are.” The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution use the plural. The Federalists used “is,” which helped make their case for unified federal power. After the Civil War, the North tended to use “is,” while the South more often stuck with “are.” A linguistic shift can reflect societal changes, or even propel them. I’m not saying that reclaiming “is” will help the American teams in future World Cups, but it can’t hurt. If we can’t even count them, how can we count on them? ♦