Murder investigation launched after two found dead in West Bridgford house

“The old witch has my post removed and then goes on a poisonous rant at FW which includes the following;

"But then I'm not an opinionated blowhard and pub bore, nor desperate to impress posters on these threads.(What a sign of desperate insecurity!) FW constantly attempts to parade an intellectual ability."

What a silly thing to say - that is exactly what you are! Although you of course stupid with it.”

“Just to reiterate, the up-to-date (2008 in fact) edition of Fowler's English Usage, which is generally accepted as a guide to current accepted usage, states that
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When a collective noun is followed by of + plural noun or pronoun (as in a number of people), there is a general preference for a plural construction
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Thus confirming that jennywitch's objection to "A team of detectives are working" is not only pedantic but also factually incorrect.

Rather than simply admit her error, she then launches into a rather silly attack, further compounding the evidence of her ignorance of the subject by a completely irrelevant discussion of count and non-count nouns, which has no significance at all here.

A further attempt at obfuscation then follows by pointing out that the correct usage would be "The team is working on....", which is entirely true but equally irrelevant, since here the construction is "a team of detectives are working," and the prevailing view, as confirmed by the current edition of Fowler's, is that in current usage the plural is generally more appropriate.

Personally, I don't really care, and have no objection at all to the singular usage since the meaning is entirely clear in either case. The only person who is trying to be prescriptive is jennywitch, who thought she was making a point by highlighting what she incorrectly perceived to be an error in the quote provided by the police.

Perhaps mildly more interesting is why anyone would think they were making a point by highlighting such a trivial thing, even if it had been correct. However, a quick browse of her past posts here reveals that jennywitch has a long history of making anti-police statements and picking people up on their use of English which she deems inferior to hers, so the response clearly says a good deal more about her than anything else.”

“jennywitch - normally 'a team' would be used with a singular verb, but there are permitted exceptions where you have both singular and plural nouns in front of the verb. Do we wish to stress that a team is working, or that detectives are working? In this particular instance I think either is acceptable. I'm sure though that 'wjhy' is nothing more than a typo.”

“Because that would be far more important than actually doing their job.
Im sure it's actually the press office that write the story on the Officers behalf anyway.
Perhaps you should get your priorities right and also learn to spell whilst your at it, "Why" doesn't have a "j" in it.”

“Jennywitch.. Very clever but there is no 'j' in the word 'why'.”

“Wjhy? . . .Wjhy? . . . Wjhy? . . . Can't they communicate?”

“"A team IS working", not "are".

One does not piece together a chain - the metaphor comes from patchwork, where " piecing" i s the name for joining together the various smaller shapes.One finds links in a chain.

Wjhy can the police never communicate in good English?”