I know I’ve been a bit heavy on T-shirt postings these days, but this latest T-shirt deserves attention. As soon as I fully understood what it meant, I felt the urge to buy it, just for its grammatical correctness!
At first, I thought it said, “We’re #1.” That would make it a nice antiquated T-shirt, reminiscent of the past. But then I realized that I had read the words too quickly, and hadn’t noticed that there was no apostrophe.
The shirt is meant to read, “Were #1,” as in “Used to be #1.”
For that reason, I ABSOLUTELY LOVE THIS T-SHIRT.
Some of you know that I am a huge geography nerd in addition to being a grammar nerd. In fact, I’m much more of a geography-phile than a grammar-phile.
Because of my geographic knowledge, I am particularly THRILLED that this shirt includes Northern Ireland in order to form the United Kingdom. The United Kingdom consists of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland; Britain consists of everything but Northern Ireland.
For those reasons, this shirt is PERFECT.
Buy it here. It’s on sale for $14.99 this week.
I already own three shirts from bustedtees.com: Without Me, It’s Just Aweso; Irish I Were Drunk (I wear it exclusively on St. Paddy’s Day and on days when I go to Celtics games) and SILF.
I swear, Busted Tees isn’t paying me to advertise their wares. The fact that the “Were #1” shirt took me a second to actually get it made it well worth posting!
The Grammar Vandal 
haaaaa I never picked up on that. I will soon be able to offer you the finest tees in the universe. Rizzo Tees will soon be taking over, lol
SILF is the best shirt that Busted has……. … too damn funny
As a baseball fan, I love the 756* shirt, and as a Canadian I get a kick out of Canada: America’s Hat. I do like like the Without Me It’s Just Aweso shirt, but the apostrophe is missing. Also, what’s up with the site’s “Similiar shirts” feature on each shirt’s page?
ps. I’ve been reading your blog for a couple of weeks now and I enjoy it immensely!
Glad you like the blog, Rob!
My company has a Canadian office, and one of my friends wore the “Canada: America’s Hat” shirt the day several of our Canadian colleagues visited. He planned ahead and bought it way in advance.
Please explain why it isn’t “Was #1,” as in “The United Kingdom was #1” or “Great Britain was #1.”
I was thinking the same thing as Alexa. It can’t even be “The British Isles were #1” since the shirt doesn’t include the whole of Ireland. Am I missing something?
Good point. The way I looked at it, to me it seemd like, “[They] were #1.” But it works because “we’re” and “were” look so similar.
Remember that in British English, singular nouns that represent more than one thing (“committee,” “team,” “herd,” etc.) are assigned plural verb forms. On the t-shirt, think of (understood) “England” as a plural, particularly if the reference might be to a sports team. When Commonwealth sportswriters discuss English national teams they would say, “England were soundly routed by Australia.” So “Were No. 1” makes perfect sense – to a Brit.