I've never seen this before. Not only does The Economist freely use the silly word "maths," but they go right ahead and consider it singular.
"The maths is still daunting." article
"Their maths was dodgy..." article
Maybe it's a British thing? Further - and I'm not very good at this - Google turns up tons of entries for "maths is" and "maths was," while results for "maths are" seem to be strictly limited to cases like "Students struggling with maths are going to be put to death." (Okay, not a real example, but fuck it, do the search yourself.)
Not like I care, just strikes me as something I wouldn't find myself saying. Are there any analogous cases of bizarro opposite nouns?
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2 comments:
Probably, maths is simply short for Mathematics. Which, like Aeronautics or Genetics, is a field of study, and is a singular noun. So, Maths is singular and ought to be.
I was going to lash out at you, but that's rather elegant. But I think at a more basic level "maths" wants to equal "math + plural" - it's the more economical parsing of what should be a pretty straightforward noun. The only analogy I could think of was the British "the hospital ARE..." or something like that, and some confusion with band names. I don't know. I just don't know.
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