Subject-Verb Synchronicity

In front of Caffe Aroma in Buffalo, I met a man named Rick who wanted to discuss wording he had encountered in a book: “a handful of supporters were.” For example:

A handful of supporters ______ (was, were) protesting outside the company’s headquarters.

Rick told me, “I was thinking ‘handful’ was singular, but it was using it as a plural, and then I couldn’t decide whether—”

“If you were not thinking about grammar at all, is there a direction you would head by instinct?” I interrupted. Sometimes instinct differs from what we were taught to do, or think we were taught to do, and when that happens, the choice may merit fresh consideration.

“Well, I would have thought it was singular,” said Rick.

“So it’s not just that it’s something you remember from school?” I asked. “I was possibly taught to use a singular there, but I don’t think that corresponds to common usage or common sense. You could put ‘handful’ into the bucket of collective nouns, like ‘group’ or ‘council.’ And I often use those with plurals.”

“Oh!” said Rick.

Collective nouns are singular in form but plural in concept. Here are some more for your files: “trio,” “staff,” “team,” “board,” and “panel.” I told Rick, “British people use them with plurals more than Americans do, so I feel this might be my one slight British affectation.”

He laughed. What an agreeable and discerning man he was to laugh at my grammar jokes!

“Here’s another example,” I said. “Would you say ‘the couple is arguing’ or ‘the couple are arguing’?”

“Is,” said Rick. (I would have picked “are,” but reader, please do not give up on me now when we’ve already come so far together. This is a carefully considered position.)

I added more conspicuous conflict to the next example I gave Rick, who seemed content to keep conjugating on demand:

The couple ______ (is, are) throwing stuffed elephants at each other.

He picked a singular verb again: “is.”

“Doesn’t it bother you that you then have ‘each other’ at the end and there’s antagonistic action, so they’re acting as individuals?” I asked. “Because it bothers me.”

“Each other,” said Rick. “Well, that’s interesting, but I would say ‘is,’ because ‘each other’ sounds singular to me.”

“That’s not the subject, though,” I said. “‘Each other’ is stressing that they’re acting as independent elements. A usage distinction that’s often made with collective nouns is that if the individual members are acting in concert, you use a singular verb. If they’re not, then it’s more likely to tilt into plural, but not so much in the US as in the UK. So I feel I may have to move.”

“That’s great,” said Rick, laughing. “That’s helpful. Thank you.”

In England, you might see something like “United are in town today,” referring to the soccer team Manchester United. Recently online, I saw an American woman who went to junior high school with me in California conjugating the company name Google with “have.” That is understandable, because she moved to Europe ages ago, but companies are normally singular in the US.

Here’s a basketball-themed example I like:

The New York Knicks ____ (is, are) on a winning streak, but the Miami Heat ____ (is, are) not.

What would you do? Plural for both? Plural for the Knicks, singular for the Heat? I am definitely an “are”/“are” kind of gal on this one.

The New York Knicks are on a winning streak, but the Miami Heat are not.

For me this sounds weird:

The New York Knicks are on a winning streak, but the Miami Heat is not.

I can’t do that. Once again, if this bothers you, please consider it my one British affectation. I think we Americans should all be allowed one.

One day early in Grammar Table history in New York, a girl about nine years old arrived at the table with her mother and asked, “Why do people use ‘there’s’ when the noun after it is plural?”

“That’s a really great question!” I said, impressed. She was talking about this kind of thing:

There’s some orangutans in that tree.

“Orangutans” is the subject and it’s plural, so her point was that the verb should be plural, too. In other words, “are.”

There are some orangutans in that tree.

I explained to my young visitor that many people just default to the singular verb after “there,” no matter what follows, in part because they don’t realize that in a sentence beginning “there is” or “there are,” the subject follows the verb rather than preceding it. People also sometimes just think “there” sounds singular. Here’s another example.

There’s a lot of books here.

I would say and write “are” in the sentence above (“There are a lot of books here”), but it is fact that I have in my life begun sentences beginning with “there,” then picked a singular verb, then found myself crashing unexpectedly into a plural subject. When you start a sentence with “there,” you don’t always know exactly what’s going to come next. Things can multiply.

At a local café a few days later, I ran into the conjugating girl’s mother. She recognized me.

“You’re the Grammar Table lady!” she said. “My daughter was really excited about the Grammar Table, and she’s already decided she’s going to be a grammar queen for Halloween next year!”

I got a similar question some months later, on Martha’s Vineyard. As I sat under a nice big tree in the shade, a woman with shoulder-length gray hair said, “I think it’s supposed to be an easy one, but nobody seems to know the answer. When you say to somebody, ‘Attached is this and that,’ is it supposed to be ‘Attached are’?”

“I do ‘attached are,’” I said.

“Is that not a grammar issue?” asked the woman, whose name was Melanie. “Is there not a right answer?”

“Well, the subject is technically the two things if you’re using an ‘and’ to combine them,” I said. “You’re not talking about ‘as well as,’ right?”

“No,” said Melanie.

What I meant was this:

Attached are my time sheet and my status report.

as opposed to this:

Attached is my time sheet as well as my status report.

The subject of the first sentence above is both the time sheet and the status report, so the verb is plural: “are.” In the second sentence, you match the verb with the part before “as well as,” meaning “time sheet” alone, so the verb is singular. The status report, while not exactly an aside, is tossed aside when you are picking your verb, so you end up with “is.”

Sometimes a grammatical concept or editorial convention comes into conflict with the goal of sounding good or natural. It is rare that such a thing befalls me, but if it does, do I want to choose a verb that sticks out like an oversize rusty bent nail—a talking rusty nail—and announces, “I know the grammar and I’m going to demo that, even if it’s a style nightmare”?

I do not. And there are many ways to write most ideas.

I told Melanie, “Sometimes even if I have a compound subject after ‘there is’ or ‘there are,’ it sounds a little odd to use a plural verb, maybe because the first element is singular and on the longish side and you can’t really feel the plural nature of the subject.”

I gave her an example:

Attached are an invitation for the Acheson party and an architectural drawing for the new site.

“In that case I might use ‘as well as,’” I said, “because then I’m off the hook and I can use a singular verb.”

Attached is an invitation for the Acheson party as well as an architectural drawing for the new site.

“I go through all sorts of permutations and contortions for this,” I added.

“So you would use ‘are’ if the two things were simpler, like ‘an invitation and a drawing’?” asked Melanie.

“Yes, but I do often prefer to write ‘I have attached’ in that case,” I said. Melanie made a small grammar moan.

“It all depends on how I feel it sounds,” I said. “But I have done it. I will do it.”

“Okay,” said Melanie, resignedly. “I like the ‘as well as’ trick. I like that, or ‘I have attached.’ I mean, I could have always done that.”

“I usually do ‘I have attached,’ or ‘I’ve attached,’ because it feels more like how I would communicate in speech,” I said.

“But this is email,” said Melanie.

“I know,” I said. “But I email in a style that is pretty close to my speech rhythms. I do ‘attached is’ or ‘attached are’ when I already have other sentences beginning with ‘I’ and I don’t want to sound like a complete narcissist.”

Melanie laughed. “This is way beyond grammar,” she said.

Now, you may have thought we were done with Rick in Buffalo from the beginning of this chapter, but we are not. There is more to report from in front of Caffe Aroma, where Rick demonstrated excellent conjugation-discussion endurance.

After we discussed “handful,” I told Rick, “You were taught the same thing I was: that the subject can’t be part of a prepositional phrase. You look at the noun before it, and if it is singular, then the idea was, it doesn’t matter what’s happening after.”

“Right, exactly,” said Rick.

What are the subjects of these, for example?

Three of the girls were late for trapeze class.

One of my best friends is giving a presentation on fossils.

The manager of the grocery store helped me find the liverwurst.

Did you pick “three,” “one,” and “manager”? If you did, you are right!

What comes after the “of” is normally not relevant in determining whether a subject is singular or plural. This idea works in many independent clauses, as in the three examples above, but there are complications. Collective nouns as subjects are one of those complications, since they are sometimes treated as singular and sometimes treated as plural.

In addition, math grammar can be messy: what is inside the prepositional phrase does sometimes affect verb choice. I gave my new friend from Buffalo another scenario and asked him which verb he would pick.

One percent of our employees _____ (is, are) using the treadmills at lunch.

“One percent is,” said Rick.

“But what if you had five thousand employees?” I asked.

“Ah!” he said, looking amused. “I would use ‘are.’”

I definitely recommend “are” in this case. “One percent of” is not comparable to one apple, or one tiger, or one ukulele. It is telling you what portion of a group of people use the treadmills. One percent of the employees could mean a lot of people.

If the one percent were of something uncountable, however, the verb would be singular:

One percent of the pie is missing.*

“Majority” works the same way:

A majority of our employees are now using the treadmills at lunch.

but

The majority of the pie is missing.

“What I like about these questions is that there’s an intersection between grammar and math,” I told my new friend Rick. “To me that’s fascinating. I sometimes write word problems that combine grammar and math and post them on social media, and so far they’ve been surprisingly unpopular.”

He laughed and told me, “You make people’s heads hurt.”

A last, possibly head-hurting topic involves subject-verb agreement in relative clauses. This doesn’t come up much at the Grammar Table, but I have seen so many people grammarsplaining this topic to strangers online (incorrectly, I mean) that I wish to address it here.

This is one of the trickier topics in this book, so you might want to fortify yourself with snacks before reading further. Let’s start with these two sentences.

One of the children has been stealing licorice.

Bo is one of the three children who have been stealing licorice.

In the first one, which is a single simple independent clause, the notion that the subject cannot be part of the prepositional phrase (“of the children”) applies. The subject is “one,” and the verb is singular to match it: “has.”

Here is a new sentence with a comparable structure:

Marlene brought me a pile of dolls that were missing their eyes.

Some people will argue reflexively that because “of dolls” is a prepositional phrase, the underlined verb should instead be a singular—“was”—in order to match “pile.” I must put my foot down here. First of all, we are talking about “their” eyes, not “its eyes,” and that is an important clue. Good grammar requires common sense. 

In my sentence with Marlene and the eyeless dolls, “Marlene” is the subject, “brought” is the verb, “me” is the indirect object, and “pile” is the direct object, modified by the prepositional phrase “of dolls.”

Next you have the relative clause “that ______ (was, were) missing their eyes.” The way you figure out the verb here is to decide what “that” refers to. A pile wasn’t missing “their” eyes; the dolls were missing their eyes. The sensible choice here is the plural verb “were.”

I’m sorry for this creepy image, but I hope it will teach relative clause grammarsplainers—I’m not pointing fingers, but you know who you are—an important lesson: Grammar is varied and complicated, and we need to stay humble before it.

As Hamlet told Horatio, “There are more things in heaven and earth . . . than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

Before we depart this chapter, I’d like to take one final look at a couple of poor misunderstood pronouns, whose versatility is underestimated and whose verb-conjugation opportunities are, as a result, unjustly limited.

One winter day, when I was stationed inside the Seventy-Second Street subway station at Broadway, a woman with energetic curly gray hair came over.

“There are so many mistakes now,” she said. “It’s terrible. People even use a plural verb with ‘none.’ That’s wrong! ‘None’ means ‘not one.’ It goes with a singular verb!”

“Well,” I said, “‘none’ is broadly accepted with both plural and singular verbs, and in my own habits, it’s actually much more common with a plural verb.”

She gave me Grammarian Side-Eye.

“None can mean ‘not one’ or ‘not any,’” I said, undeterred. “When I mean ‘not any,’ I often treat it as a plural.”

For example, in the question “Are any of you going to the party later?” the subject is “any” and the verb is plural: “are.”

My explanation earned me more Grammarian Side-Eye.

“See, this is why I bring all these reference books with me,” I said, waving my hand at the books in front of me. “This way you don’t have to rely on the word of a random stranger sitting at a table on the street.”

I opened one of the books and turned it so she could read the “none” entry more easily. It said the same thing I had just said. She read it. Her eyes were unhappy.

“If you look that up in other reliable usage guides,” I told her, “you will find that same point of view confirmed.”

There was nothing more to say; she walked off into the gray Sunday rain. I and/or civilization had let her down.

Quizlet

She was one of the students who ______ (was, were) awarded a scholarship to study entomology in Argentina.

Answer: “Were,” because the antecedent of “who” is “students.” Another way to think about it: Multiple students received the scholarship, and she was one of that group.