A CYFS manager who prepared staff for a visit from the Social Development Minister with an email warning them:
“This is a formal visit and she is not your ‘friend’. It’s a bit like the relationship between a servant and a master, i.e. the servant knows their place.
This means:
a) The manager should know that the possessive pronoun should not take the plural form after a singular noun.
b) The manager should get out more.
c) They’re public servants and should know their palce, what’s the problem?
d) The manager made an error of judgement.
e) The reporters who made so much of this story made an error of judgement.
Homepaddock 
Your points a – d are your democratic right to onterpret the news as you understand it from the media all good stuff.
Your comment in e highlights yet another manifestation of the position that has been adopted by the MSM where they are so enlightened and indispensable to the modern world just reporting the news is deemed insufficient, they have to interpret it for us if they haven’t created it as well. How sad that the great unwashed havn’t tumbled to this cynical manipulation of the information stream that comes from local TV and dead tree press publications where most still gain “their ” news from.
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The email fails for another reason..
The staff are not employed by or responsible to the Minister.. the SSC is their employer.
The Minister is due the normal courtesy and respect shown to an important visitor and can certainly be engaged on matters pertaining to the job.. thats why she’s visiting.
JC
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