Subject-Verb Agreement With Intervening Prepositional Phrases
A fancy title for a simple concept.
Another blogger asked the Grammar Guru, “Will you please teach people about proper subject-verb agreement — especially in cases where the subject may seem to be plural, but really isn’t . . . as in a flock of seagulls? I am getting quite sick of seeing things such as “The flock of seagulls are flying south . . . “
As is the Grammar Guru.
This is a common problem with a very simple solution. Strip your sentence bare. Remember how your grammar teacher used to tell you that a sentence consists of a noun and a verb, along with a few modifiers? Well, that’s what’s going on in my reader’s example. To make sure that you have the correct verb tense for your subject, you have to strip the basic noun+verb sentence of all its modifiers. (This is why teachers made you diagram. So you’d learn to peel a sentence apart.)
The flock of seagulls is/are flying south. The two crucial word in this sentence are “flock” and “is/are.” The words “the, of, seagulls, flying, south” are all modifiers. I’m not going to go into all of them here. The ones we are concerned with are “of” and “seagulls.” They make up a prepositional phrase that modifies “flock.” (What kind of flock is it? A flock of seagulls.) “Of” is the preposition (and you should have memorised those in school), and “seagulls” is the object of the preposition. “Flock” is a collective noun, and is therefore singular. There may be thirty seagulls in the flock, but there’s only one flock.
So which verb to use? Well, I hope you would not say “Flock are.” “Flock” requires the singular verb “is.”
This test will work for nearly any situation in which you find a subject modified by a prepositional phrase. (It’s worth noting that the confusion usually occurs when the subject is singular (especially the collective singular) and the object of the preposition is plural. For some reason, the plural subject with a singular object of preposition doesn’t tend to confuse people.)
Examples:
- The boy with the out-of-town guests was/were playing baseball. (“was”)
- The apples from the boy is/are on the teacher’s desk. (“are”)
- The envelopes containing the invitations to the wedding is/are in the box. (“are”)
- The bowl of apples, pears, and bananas is/are on the table. (“is”)
- The herd of cows was/were walking to the milking shed. (“was”)
If You Meet a Murderer, Will You Mete Out Justice?
Watch these tricky little sound-alikes, because misusing them can really make you look bad.
Both are verbs (well, most commonly used as verbs).
Meet means to come face to face with, to come together with. (Example: We will meet in the conference room.)
Mete means to dispense or hand out. (Example: The food pantry will mete out the donations to those who need assistance.) Mete is often used in the sense of dispensing legal consequences: The judge will mete out justice to the vandals.
At the risk of adding confusion, the Grammar Guru should point out that meet can also be used as an adjective meaning “suitable or appropriate.” For example, a “help-meet” is a helper suitable to another person. Or you might say, “We have been invited to a fancy-dress ball on Saturday, but in light of our father’s death this morning, it’s not meet that we should go.”
Arrant Nonsense
Okay, my ex, along with about two dozen other people, has forwarded the following message to me.
“Don’t delete this because it looks weird. Believe it or not you can read it.
I cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer inwaht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Amzanig huh? yaeh and I awlyas thought slpeling was ipmorantt.”
All I have to say is that this sort of arrant nonsense is not amusing in the least. Just what we need is some semi-scientific study lending credence to the idea that one can dispense with the niceties of spelling and grammar because a person’s mind can figure it out anyway.
Read my fingertips, folks: Spelling and grammar are important. No matter what a bunch of scientists say.
Sure, you can read the paragraph. But can you read it as quickly as you might usually read a similar message? Is it efficient? Does it lend itself to clear and effective communication? NO. The Grammar Guru guarantees you that if you turned in a report with that kind of gobbledygook in it, you’d be put on probation, at the very least.
Perhaps the Grammar Guru is taking this a bit seriously … but the Grammar Guru takes the language seriously. You see, one can communicate with gestures and grunts, but why would one want to? And the mere suggestion that the rules of grammar and spelling might be dispensed with —- well, it’s a blow at the foundations of civilised communication. If we lose the ability to communicate clearly in a civilised fashion, we will soon find that we inhabit a society in which there can be no trust, because no one will be certain to understand exactly what another person is trying to communicate. And then society will collapse.
Chicken Little is going to return to the hen-house now.
It’s Just a Phase; Don’t Let It Faze You …
and don’t give me any flak … I’m just a flack for good grammar and usage.
These two pairs of words are consistently misused, so I want to set the record straight once and for all.
Phase is a noun indicating a passing behavioural pattern or a certain stage of development. (Example: Most children go through a rebellious phase in their teens.) It can also be a verb indicating a gradual movement. (Example: We are going to phase in these changes slowly, so that we don’t upset anyone.)
Faze is a verb meaning “to discompose or discomfit.” Example: Her cruel words didn’t faze him; he continued to stalk her night and day.
Flak is a noun referring to the bits of shrapnel and antiaircraft weaponry used to destroy enemy fighters. (Example: John’s Sopwith Camel took a lot of flak, but he brought it down safely.)
A flack is a press agent or publicist. When used as a verb, it means “to promote.” (Example: I spent weeks flacking my novel as part of a book tour.)
While some dictionaries and even grammarians indicate that flak and flack can be used interchangeably, it is best, I think, to go with the stricter interpretation so that you do not leave yourself open to correction. Of course, I take a lot of flak for my pedantic opinions.
Should You Inquire or Enquire?
This one is very easy if you are an American. In American English, inquire is the preferred form.
If you are in Great Britain, however, things get a bit more tricky. Enquire is used of informal questions, but inquire is used of official investigations. Examples: I am going into that pub to enquire whether they have Killian’s or Guinness. The local council asked a committee to inquire into the alleged embezzlement of community funds.
Here again, the author must consider his audience. If you are an American or are writing for a predominantly American audience, use inquire and inquiry. If you are British or are writing for a British audience, you must choose whether you need the informal or the formal form of the word.
Assure, Ensure, or Insure … When to Use Which
These three words cause a lot of confusion. There are some simple ways to remember which one should be used in what circumstance. I referred to the ultimate English reference tool, Fowler’s Modern English Usage, to ensure that I gave you the most accurate information on this sticky little problem.
Assure is a verb meaning to offer reassuring words in order to remove doubt. Example: Mark assured Helen that he had not forgotten their anniversary, and he pulled out a gift-wrapped box to prove it.
Ensure is a verb meaning to make certain. Example: Please ensure that these documents are mailed no later than March 1.
Insure is a verb meaning to protect an asset financially. Example: Irene insured her life for half a million dollars after her divorce left her with three children to provide for.
We can put them all in one sentence, thus: The agent assured us that if each of us insured our lives for $250,000 each, the policy would be sufficient to ensure that our children got a college education in the event of our premature deaths.
I hope that these examples and definitions provide you with the confidence to properly use these words in your writing and speech.
Today I Am a Prophet Who Wants to Make a Profit
And I want to tell you about the difference between the words prophecy and prophesy.
A prophecy is a prediction. This word is a noun, and it’s pronounced /PRAH fuh see/. Example: Cassandra warned the Greeks not to take the Trojan horse into the city, but because of Apollo’s curse, no one believed her prophecy of doom to follow.
To prophesy is to make a prediction. This word is a verb, and it’s pronounced /PRAH fuh sigh/. Example: Even Nostradamus could not accurately prophesy the date of the end of the world.
Remember, if you are a prophet, you must prophesy carefully. One false prophecy can ruin your reputation as a prophet forever.
While we’re at it, let’s clear up the difference between a prophet and a profit. This one is easy. A prophet is a person. A profit is money earned in excess of what is spent on a project.
SO: A prophet who makes a false prophecy will doubtless find that his failure to accurately prophesy has cost him a substantial profit.
Some Pointers for New Bloggers — NOT Just Grammar
Hey folks! I’m seeing a lot of new faces here on Blogit (handles, anyway), which is marvellous. But I also see a lot of people making some of the same mistakes I did….I’d like to save you some time, trouble, and embarrassment.
- Don’t make a whole new blog for each post. Group your posts into general blogs. For example, if you are writing a multi-part story or essay, each chapter or section could be a post in one blog titled “My Story.”
- Don’t write really long blogs; most people look for half a page or less when looking to read a blog. Five or six paragraphs with fewer than five sentences per ‘graph is great. An exception might be the fiction category, where it makes sense to break by chapters.
- Do write a catchy headline — “How I Killed My Brother” is far less interesting than “I Shot Him From a Cannon into Rockefeller Square.” And sex, violence, and petty squabbles sell.
- Do break your posts into paragraphs, check spelling, and use correct grammar. Large blocks of text are a big turnoff and make reading more difficult. Mistakes in spelling and grammar may turn off readers who value effort and professionalism in the material that they read. Too many of either and you will lose clicks, no matter how catchy your headlines.
- Do use a font that is easy to read. Huge fonts and tiny fonts are really for emphasis. Easiest to read on-screen is a 12 or 14 point font. Script fonts are hard to read on-screen. The best choices of body font are the common ones: Arial, Verdana, Times New Roman, or Garamond. You can use the fancy ones for headlines.
- Go easy on the emphasis. Bold, italic, underline, lots of bangs (exclamation points), rows of queries (question marks) should all be used sparingly. They create visual clutter that obscures your message. I prefer to use bold and italic together, as I find that the italics alone tend to disappear on-screen. Example: Hi, my name is Editormum. Hi, my name is Editormum.
- Don’t try to follow every trend that comes up. Sometimes there will be a rash of people posting distribution lists or top ten lists, trash-talking others, or some such business, in an attempt to garner more clicks. If you follow every trend, you’ll get a reputation as a click whore, and your real writing will suffer.
- Do diversify. Try having a journal blog, an opinion blog, and a blog in your category of expertise (such as “Family” or “Arts.”) This widens your reader base but keeps your blogging organised and manageable.
- Don’t spread yourself too thin. Some bloggers start a bunch of new blogs only to discover that they cannot keep them all going. Then they have to weed out, move posts, and consolidate to get things manageable again. If you have more than one blog in a given category, you are probably over-diversified.
- Do remember to read your fellow bloggers, comments on their posts, and create a good “About Me” page. These three tactics can really boost your visibility as you begin your blogging journey.
Unh, Thag Use Big Word…
and nine-tenths of the population probably has no clue what Thag meant. I have come across the word solipsism or one of its variants three times in one day. That’s not exactly a common word among the general population, yet the first two times I met it, I nodded politely and read on. The third time, however, I was a bit annoyed. What was with these authors, anyway, using words that I couldn’t immediately define and illustrate? So I did what less than ten percent of readers ever do — I looked it up.
Solipsism, in a nutshell, is the idea that the self is the only verifiable reality. It is often used — with only slight imprecision — to mean egotism. But solipsism is more than the mere narcissism that “egotism” suggests to the untutored. (Narcissism and egotism are actually two different things, though the words are often used as synonyms.) Solipsism says, essentially, that the only thing one can truly claim objective, observational proof of is oneself. You cannot rationally, objectively prove that I exist. What if I am a phantasm conjured by your imagination to give you opportunity to interact or to provide confirmation of your decisions?
Solipsistic writing, then, would be a written creation that claims that its creator is the only real thing in existence. Egotistic writing, on the other hand, would claim that its creator was the only important or worthy thing in existence. And narcissistic writing would reflect the writer’s consuming self-love.
Hope that clarifies things for any others who were attacked by four-syllable words at every meal today. And I hope it nudges writers to provide some sort of definition for the uncommon words that they choose to use — at least the first time that they use them — since most readers are disinclined to break the flow of their reading by grabbing the dictionary.
Towing Lines and Hoeing Roads … What ARE We Coming to?
Two quick little corrections for some frequently misquoted idioms.
One does not “tow the line;” one “toes the line.” This idiom refers to runners at the beginning of a race. They line up on the start line with their toes on or slightly behind the line. It may also refer to sailors standing in formation. In any case, it literally means to line one’s toes up with a given mark. Figuratively, it means to follow the rules with scrupulous care.
Similarly, one does not have a “tough road to hoe,” but a “tough row to hoe.” You can’t hoe a road. The hoe is far too small to adequately meet the purpose, and the asphalt (or even packed dirt) would ruin the edge of your tool. This expression comes from (surprise!) farming. One hoes a plot of land into rows of carefully turned dirt so that one can plant crops. If there are lots of weeds, rocks, or stumps and roots, it’s a tough row to hoe. Figuratively speaking, this means that a person is facing a difficult and daunting situation.