Re: CHAT: Team Names

John Cowan wrote:
> Now we have teams named by ordinary singular nouns such as "Jazz",
> "Magic", and "Heat", and there is considerable tension in sports writing
> between singular agreement (grammatically called for, and natural
> in American writing when applied to collectives: "the government is",
> "the jury decides", etc.) and plural agreement (very unnatural,
> but uniform with other team names).
At least "jazz," "magic," and "heat" are mass nouns. There are also
teams named after more quantifiable things, such as a group of sports
teams I have heard of called the "Rockford Sports Monster" and a
teamed called the "Madison Black Wolf." I don't understand at all why
someone would pick these singular, quantifiable nouns for names. Go
fig :)