Is grammar too hard for university administrators?!

I’m finishing my masters degree this semester. Over the past two years I have received many many poorly written documents from “administrators” in the school (a mid-sized public university). I have moaned and groaned, and even laughed about the unintended implications of them. BUT…this really takes the cake.

Every student gets 5 fancy tickets/invitations to the commencement ceremony. They are fairly well made, at least better than I expected. BUT this is what they say:

“The Class of Two Thousand and Three
of the University of <state and city>
requests the honor of your presence at their
Commencement Exercises
<date, time, location, etc.>”

Think what you will about using “and” in 2003, that is not my complaint.

The Class “requests” you at “their” commencemnt?

“They” cannot “requests”. The Class is either plural, in which case they “request”, or the class is singular.* But it’s not both. At least not the last time I checked (of course, my masters is not in English…):rolleyes:

*There are probably fancy terms for plural or singular here, but I sure as hell don’t know 'em. You know what I mean.

That should be part of your complaint, as well.

[Pet peeve mode]

“Two thousand three” is a number. “Two thousand and three” is the statement of an arithmetic problem. Then again, even The New Yorker routinely gets this wrong. Of course, this is the same magazine that insists upon spelling out all numbers: “The cost of this program is estimated to be twenty-seven million, five hundred and forty-seven thousand dollars.” Ugh.

[/Pet peeve mode]

It’s a collective noun, which can sometimes be used in the singular.

They’re first against the wall when the revolution comes.

British English almost always treats collective nouns as singular. Perhaps the person who wrote the invitations was trying for an upper-class British feel to the prose, and didn’t quite make it.

I meant to say that British English almost always treats collective nouns as plural, not singular.

That’s what I get for posting on a caffeine high…

Lily: I belive whoever wrote that bit of bad English actually might have a job at CNN. The newscaster reading this morning continously matched the verb’s number with the number of the object of the preceding prepositional phrase instead of the number of the noun which that PP was modifying.

BTW using ‘and’ in a number is AFAIK the correct and only used formation in the UK. Though we occasionally use ‘two thousand three’ as a date. I think this used to be used in the USA too.

I assume the invitation was trying to be traditional or posh; whether they were successful or correct is another matter.

(I agree with the main grammar correction.)

The use of the singular they/their goes back a long way and has quite a pedigree, so you may not want to get too incensed about it (unless you want to take to task such authors as Shakespeare, Chaucer, Dickens, Whitman, Austen, not to mention the King James Bible).

No, no, no. It has nothing to do with collective nouns, singular “they,” or anything of the sort. The point is that you can say one of two things:

The Class of 2003 requests … at its graduation… (“class” is singular, and neuter, as it happens)

or

The Class of 2003 request … at their graduation… (“class” is a collective plural).

If these don’t suit, you could always go with:

The Graduands of the Class of 2003 request … at their graduation…

Just a nitpick, but invitations don’t say anything, they read.