Just to reply en masse to the concerned Americans in my mailbox: Plurals are not a singular noun. Still correct, still grammatical. If I'm comparing two lions with one wallaby, 'The lions are not a wallaby" is a valid statement. "Oranges are not the only fruit" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oranges_Are_Not_the_Only_Fruit We have this grammatical usage in literature... everything else is blah blah blah bikeshedding. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bikeshedding Lloyd Wood lloyd.wood@xxxxxxxxxxx http://about.me/lloydwood ________________________________ From: John C Klensin <john-ietf@xxxxxxx> To: Joe Abley <jabley@xxxxxxxxxxx>; Stewart Bryant <stewart.bryant@xxxxxxxxx> Cc: ietf@xxxxxxxx Sent: Wednesday, 14 February 2018, 7:47 Subject: Re: Grammatical corrections to the headers and boilerplate text --On Tuesday, February 13, 2018 13:50 -0500 Joe Abley <jabley@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On 13 Feb 2018, at 03:37, Stewart Bryant > <stewart.bryant@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > >> This may be a US vs UK English thing, but I agree with LLoyd, >> the original seems quite correct to me. > > I agree. The replacement text also seems fine, though. I guess > the new text is more correct, if we're measuring correctness > by proportion of the audience that is happy with it. I suggest a slightly different measure, which is tied to a long tradition of the normative publication language of the RFC Series being, explicitly, American English. That was, IIR, much more strongly reflected in some of the informal documents used after RFC 2223 and before 7322, but 7322 reflects it as a preference for American spelling (Section 3.1) and the Chicago Manual of Style (Section 1). The latter is definitely a reference on American English, arguably the most extreme of them (and, at least IMO, getting more so in recent years). Now, while RFC 7322 is not explicit about it, although it is implied in the spelling discussion in Section 3.1, there is also a long tradition of allowing authors to do things in whatever way they like as long as the language is recognizably English and the document is consistent throughout. So, let me suggest two theories: (1) Following American English and the Chicago Manual of Style, the current boilerplate construction is simply wrong, partially because the presence or absence of negation changes nothing in American English about subject-verb-predicate matching of number, and the proposed new text is correct. (2) Following the consistency rule, if the rest of an RFC is written consistently in American English (either because the author wrote it that way or because the Production Center corrected it), then the boilerplate should also be consistent with American English. Same conclusion: the proposed new text is correct. However, the second theory suggests a different option which, if someone wants to advocate (and presumably do the work), I would personally support if the RFC Editor had no objections. That would be to allow instructions to the RFC Editor and, presumably, a directive to XML2RFC, to specify the author's preferred English style. If that directive specified "American" (presumably the default, at least for historical reasons) then the boilerplate would be shifted to match that preference. If it specified "British", then that preference would be followed and the boilerplate would read as Lloyd and Stewart have suggested (with other parts of the boilerplate being made consistent). I do have two cautions about that plan, but they are just cautions. First, there is a slippery slope due to the many versions of English out there. I'm happy with the American versus British dichotomy, but, as someone who has never been a huge fan of the Chicago manual, I can imagine an argument for different styles of grammatical hair-splitting based on regional or dialect preferences. Probably we don't want to go there, but other opinions may reasonably differ. Second, some of the other boilerplate (not affected by the current discussion but possibly affected if we start doing wholesale revisions to conform to, e.g., Gowers or Fowler) could run into a problem with assumptions that the legalese assumes US law. IANAL and have no idea whether changes there would create any normative problems, but have often been told that an important principle in any litigation is not to start out by irritating the relevant judge, including by appearing illiterate to a judge that is sensitive to such issues. So be careful what you wish for. best, john