Andrew Stevenson, and bring back some rules and regulations ...

And another thing. There it was, smack dab in the middle of the page, just below the digital masthead:

Company ... have gone to ground?

Dammit, another whipper snipper exercising discretion and initiative and authority, Frank Furedi style, and not a subbie around to drag out the dusty, mouldy, Fairfax style guide to remind the offender that 'rulez is rulez' and 'company' is singular in this context.

As everybody surely knows, the United States Supreme Court has deemed that companies are people, with feelings and moods and the right to piss against the wall lavish sums of money in election campaigns (or something like that, as Schumpeter explains in Peculiar People for The Economist).

It's a sorry scam, no doubt, a six-figure sum, but does that excuse such a singular, almost criminal, error Mr. Stevenson?

Let us revert to the BBC World Service, here:

How many subsidiaries has your company got?

Study these further examples and note that in informal speech we often switch from one form to the other:

- How many subsidiaries does your company have?
- It has two.

Now the principals or directors or the staff of the company might have gone to ground, but the company itself in its singularity has gone to ground ...

Further stunning evidence that conservatives like Frank Furedi blathering on about flexibility and initiative and enterprise and giving Tony Blair a free hand in the leadership game is a world gone mad, and there's simply no rules left as a result of their folly ...

Hah. Got you going.

Should that be ... there is simply no rules left, or ... there are simply no rules left as a result of their George W. Bush-loving folly?

(Below: found at Grumpy Grammar).