None takes on the pluralness or singleness of its reference. I think it would be plural, since the phrase means "none of these companies is more deserving." None is such a chameleon that most people would consider singular or plural correct.

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Wow!! That is so so cool. I was seriously thinking about naming my cat Hatshepsut, but how do you abbreviate that? So I went with Amarna instead.

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Okay, maybe Ginger's right. Stupid chameleon word.

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I was seriously thinking about naming my cat Hatshepsut, but how do you abbreviate that?

Hattie?

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Nope. "none of which is more deserving" refers to your company, not to all of the organizations.

Huh. I guess I'm reading it as "not one of those organizations." Which, because of this rule

With count nouns, you can use either the singular or

the plural. ("None of the books is..." or "None of the books are...") Usually, the plural sounds more natural, unless you're trying to emphasize the idea of "not one", or if the words that follow work better in the singular.

means I'm wrong anyway.

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reputationdefender

First, we SEARCH. We scour the Internet to dig up every possible piece of information about you and present it in an interactive monthly report. You can view this report by email or by logging into our site. This information is detailed in straightforward categories, including:

* Social networks (MySpace, Facebook, LiveJournal, Bebo, and more);
* Professional review websites;
* Blogs;
* Online news sources;
* Photograph, video, and audio sharing sites (Flickr, YouTube, etc.); and,
* Millions of additional sites on the "open Internet."

Next, we DESTROY. You can select any content from your report that you don't like. This is where we go to work for you.

Our trained and expert online reputation advocates use an array of proprietary techniques developed in-house to correct and/or completely remove the selected unwanted content from the web. This is an arduous and labor-intensive task, but we take the job seriously so you can sleep better at night. We will always and only be in YOUR corner.

What a bunch of wankers.

PZ says:

The "proprietary" and "arduous and labor-intensive task" seems to involve meekly asking the author to take down his article.

[link]

Yecke, Minnesota's former odious education commissioner, is now campaigning to be odious education commissioner for the state of Florida. Her history in our fair state is now a bit of a stain on her reputations, so she hired a company called "reputationdefender" to sanitize the internet for her. This company googles up people who have said unkind things about their clients and sends out email threats to them, telling them to take it down.

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The Benoit case [link] does appear to be murder/suicide.

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I have friends who did name their cat Hatshepsut and call her Hattie.

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So now that I've completely failed to give useful grammar advice, I need job-hunting help. I've been doing contract work lately, but have a potential in at a mondo big law firm. Of course, they have a correspondingly big employment application. As far as salary goes, should I put something down? Something that roughly corresponds to what I've been making contract-wise? Or should I stick to the principle of making them name a number first?

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Or should I stick to the principle of making them name a number first?

This.

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