Friday, December 28, 2012

Pay attention to plural marriages

Experienced wordsmiths know that, in a sentence, a singular subject requires the singular version of the verb. Or do they? Even professional writers sometimes trip on this rule. For example, here’s the lead from a news item published on the Des Moines Register website:
To Tom and Irene Frantzen, the mountain of corn cobs sitting in their hoop building are a valuable commodity.
Here, the subject is “the mountain of corn cobs,” and because only one “mountain” is mentioned, the subject is singular. Ignoring the misspelling of "corncob," the sentence should read:
To Tom and Irene Frantzen, the mountain of corn cobs sitting in their hoop building is a valuable commodity.

The source of this common error is the word “cobs,” which fooled the writer’s ear into thinking that the subject is a plural. The plural verb “are” just sounds better coming so soon after the word “cobs.”

So what’s the big deal? It’s a harmless mistake that doesn’t mislead the reader, right? That’s probably true in this case. But there are cases where a mismatch of number can seriously confuse the reader. Consider this example:
I told my sister that the key to the doors are hanging on the hook in the kitchen.
The reader might think that I meant to say “keys” because, in most cases, different doors have different keys. But, in my house, the front and back door s use the same key. By writing “The key to the doors is hanging on the hook in the kitchen,” I have used proper grammar and alerted my sister to look for just one key.

Now that we've cleared the air, it's time to mention that there is one violation of the rule that has become close to standard, thanks to the quest for gender equality. Consider this sentence:
Everyone needs to submit his ideas for the meeting next week.
 Though grammatically correct -- "everyone" is treated as a singular subject in classical grammar, and "his" is the appropriate pronoun. Some writers will try to make the sentence more inclusive by writing:
Everyone needs to submit his or her ideas for the meeting next week. 
Unfortunately, this construction is both a grammar blunder and unpleasantly wordy. Fortunately, even hardcore grammarians are dismounting from their high horses to allow this:
Everyone needs to submit their ideas for the meeting next week. 
This new approach (which actually has been used by fine writers for hundreds of years) can also be applied to other words that "should" take a singular verb -- including neither, everybody and anyone. Though technically singular nouns, they are routinely treated as plurals.

And, as deputy "grammar czar," I hereby give all writers permission to adopt this sensible approach. So sue me.
 
 
 


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