Collective nouns are tricky beasts. Or is the concept of collective nouns a tricky beast?

The question of whether a collective noun requires a singular or plural verb to agree with it is one many find difficult to grasp, including myself, but then I have the mighty brains of the dictionary team here to help me. Often you can wriggle around the question by rephrasing the sentence, but if some poor, uncertain linguist were to pin you down in the street (perhaps literally, because it means that much to some of them), you could give them this advice:

Go with either, depending on how you’re conceiving of the collective in question.

For example, the Beatles could be described as a cultural phenomenon. If referring to the members as a band, a single entity that defined pop music, you could say, “The band was by far the best to come out of England in the Sixties.” Alternatively, you can picture them as a group of individuals, in which case saying something like, “The band were always squabbling amongst themselves,” would be acceptable.

“Austria is a lovely country,” can sit hand-in-hand with, “Austria are winning in the football,” because the team is a collection of individuals.

The main rule is that, if at all possible, when you’re writing a piece about a collective, be consistent in your usage, so that people won’t catch on and point out the deviation.

Linguists and wordsmiths derive much enjoyment from collective nouns, coining evocative or poetic phrases, or ones with subtle puns in them, to enrich the language and amuse themselves simultaneously. It was all the rage in the nineteenth century, when people like Joseph Strutt (in his book Sports and Pastimes of England) took great care in inventing and compiling them. Birds were common subjects, e.g.: ‘a parliament of owls’ or ‘a murder of crows’.

You can extemporise, of course, picking appropriate nouns that describe the objects in some way, e.g.:

a mendacity of politicians
a polyglot of encyclopaedias
a snafu of bureaucrats
a jollity of balloons

Feel free to come up with your own appropriate examples and post them here!

That somebody might find raising funds difficult in these problematic financial times is certainly not beyond belief. That they might say, describing their plight, that ‘Getting the financing was beyond difficult’ may be more surprising.

We’re used to things being beyond recognition, beyond a doubt/beyond reasonable doubt, beyond a joke, beyond expectations or beyond our wildest dreams. We know things can be beyond control, beyond reach, or beyond repair. We can find ourselves beyond words or even beyond sleep.

Beyond is used to suggest that something is ‘outside the limits or possibilities’, physical (beyond the horizon, beyond the main road) or otherwise. Quite a few of the common uses given above are fixed or idiomatic expressions. In go beyond and related phrases, beyond is used to suggest ‘going past limits, going further/deeper’ or ‘surpassing something’, and beyond itself may be used in this way too, as in such titles or headlines as: beyond smoking, beyond the classroom, even beyond sustainability.

As these examples show, and according to the Macmillan Dictionary and other dictionaries, it is typically followed by a noun or noun phrase.

But now, as well as beyond difficult, we hear: beyond cool, beyond crazy, beyond extreme, beyond alarming, beyond boring, beyond outrageous, beyond awful, beyond sophisticated and many more, as in this experience must have been beyond terrifying. In these examples, beyond is being used to intensify adjectives, with a sense loosely similar to more than or worse/better than, and reflects the ‘more than (usual)’ sense of the phrase above and beyond (though this is used before nouns and noun phrases). It is so far less common in written material, though of course it appears in the kind of informal writing that can be found on the web. It is used in promotional and marketing material: ‘Beyond Extreme’ is the name of a company offering adventure sports; ‘Beyond Retro’ is a company offering vintage clothing.

In extending its modifying range to a different word class, the behaviour of beyond is reminiscent of the change in use of the adverb so, which moved from intensifying adjectives, and adverbs, as in so awful, so quickly, to emphasising nouns and noun phrases, as in so last year, so not what I like.