Why is it “We The North” and not “We ARE The North”?

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I think it makes us sound stupid and a little illiterate. In every use-case (official and otherwise) the slogan of “We the north” is not even grammatically correct.

Every time I see it somewhere there’s always an urge inside of me to marker in “ARE” in between the slogan.

EDIT: it’s from some basketball slogan from the Toronto Raptors as part of some campaign that stuck. I think it’s lame due to its grammatical error in the way that they use it.

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6 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

It’s just a specification of the subject. “we, the north, believe blah blah” is specifying who the subject “we” is. “we are the north” is a complete sentence on its own. It states we = North since “is” is an equalizing noun and it can stand alone without anything else. “we, the north” is almost a compound subject but it’s only a subject with a clarification, Similar to “we, the people, blah blah”. It’s not that it’s stupid or incorrect, they’re two different things.

Anonymous 0 Comments

I don’t know what exactly you are referring to but I’m guessing it’s along the lines of “We, the North,” as in “We, the people,”

Anonymous 0 Comments

“We The North” (Toronto Raptor’s Slogan) is a distinctive phrase, probably trademarked. “We are the North” is a general phrase, most likely not trademarkable.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Cause it sounds better when shouted and it’s easier to market?

Anonymous 0 Comments

Why? Because We Are The North sounds stupid and only a minority like you prefer it. The professional marketing agency that was paid a million to come up with it and do audience tests to see how people liked it thought it would be good. And it has been – it has won numerous awards and other teams have emulated it on official media. That is the business reason, our personal opinions are subjective.

Anonymous 0 Comments

You should take an intro to Linguistics class. You would learn that the phrase is actually grammatically correct. To say it’s not is like saying a grasshopper’s legs are wrong and should be a different way.