this post was submitted on 09 Feb 2024
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It's common in English to refer to a collective like a company or government as though it were an individual. I think it's just a simple short hand really.
Eg "The whitehouse said today...." We know that the whitehouse (a building) doesn't have the power of speech and that really means "a whitehouse spokesperson working in an official capacity on behalf of the government said today".
Really the headline should be something along the lines of "what, exactly, are Xbox business strategists thinking?" But because of the common knowledge of how this shorthand works they can just use the headline they did.
There's probably a fancy linguistic name for it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Sure. It's also pretty common as a joke format to respond to something one way when you know it was meant to be taken in a different way.
In English we used to call it the old switcheroo, but my comment is a pretty lame example of one.
Fair. It's hard to know sometimes if someone has English as a first or second language. People can be really technically good, but then not understand more subtle cultural things.
Never know maybe both of our comments will help some people.
Agreed. I appreciate that you went in for the explanation, BTW. It's nice to see helpful people on here.