By Ellen Jovin
When I was in third grade, I bombed a quiz on commas. It wasn’t about commas in prose, though; it was about commas in math.
For the quiz we were asked to put commas in big numbers. Somehow I failed to grasp that I needed to count trios of digits from right to left. Instead I counted left to right, ending up with numbers like 465,32 instead of 46,532.
Despite this math mishap, I joined the math team in high school, and I love grammar topics that involve at least some quantitative considerations.
Singular and plural concepts come up a lot in grammar. One chocolate lava cake is singular and should be paired with a singular verb. Seventy-two chocolate lava cakes are plural and require a plural verb. Singular English verbs end in s (“John conjugates”), whereas plural verbs do not (“johns conjugate”)—the opposite of English nouns.
To conjugate correctly, students are often taught to disregard prepositional phrases in sentences such as “One of my classmates loves grammar.” You can match “one” with “loves” and ignore the phrase “of my classmates.” This trick can be helpful, but as with many things in grammar and in life, there are complications.
What would you do with the sentence “One percent of my classmates (loves, love) grammar”?
Often people see that “one,” note the prepositional phrase, and argue for the singular “loves.” I would use “love” in that sentence. “One percent” is not one. One percent is equivalent to one-hundredth.
If you had 1,500 classmates, that means 15 would love grammar. The fact that the object of the preposition there is a countable noun—“classmates”—is highly relevant. That plural form determines my verb outcome: plural.
If the object of the preposition were an uncountable noun (also called a mass noun) such as “cheese,” however, I would use a singular verb. One percent of the cheese is gone, but one percent of the people are late.
The power of a prepositional phrase exceeds expectations.
My impression in talking to visitors at my grammar-advice stand is that they often think of any amount less than one as singular. But the number zero in front of a noun calls for a plural verb. It’s “Zero people have replied,” not “Zero person has replied.”
What would you choose in these two examples?
- One of my 20 students (is, are) taking both Latin and German.
- One in 20 students (is, are) taking both Latin and German.
I’d pick “is” in the first one but “are” in the second. “One in 20” is not expressing a singular idea. It’s closer to a percentage in concept. In the first sentence, you have 20 students. One is studying both Latin and German. In the second, you could have 4,000 students, in which case 200 of them would be studying both Latin and German!
Verb conjugations can be extra tricky in relative clauses—clauses beginning with words such as “who,” “which,” or “that.” The underlined words below are an example of a relative clause.
- Rover ate the pancakes that Carol had prepared for her mother.
Now compare these two sentences.
- One of the dogs has stolen Carol’s mom’s pancakes.
- Rover is one of the dogs that have stolen Carol’s mom’s pancakes.
The first sentence is a single independent clause. There, the notion that you disregard the prepositional phrase (“of the dogs”) for your verb conjugation makes total sense. You simply match the verb with “one” and get on with your life.
The structure of the second sentence is different. There the subject of the main clause is Rover, and the verb that goes with Rover is “is.” “One” is a subject complement; it follows a verb of being and describes Rover. “One” is modified by the prepositional phrase “of the dogs.”
The word “that” in the subsequent relative clause “that have stolen Carol’s mom’s pancakes” refers to those dogs, not Rover. Rover’s verb (“is”) has already been taken care of. Rover doesn’t need another verb.
If you are going to be grammatically and mathematically strict about things, “have” and not “has” is the correct choice. There are plural pancake-stealing dogs.
Most people seem to favor “has” there, however. There are several distracting singular elements at the beginning of the sentence—Rover, “is,” “one”—and it all just feels pretty singular. But conjugators also sometimes insist, vocally, on a singular verb because they are misremembering/misapplying the ignore-the-prepositional-phrase trick.
Adding a number to the sentence sometimes helps make the structure and idea more obvious.
- Rover is one of the three dogs that have stolen Carol’s mom’s pancakes.
Number or no number, I’ve seen this particular structure lead to condescending and incorrect grammarsplaining on the internet. And grammarsplaining etiquette requires at a minimum that the grammarsplainer’s argument be right!
Ellen Jovin is the author of the national bestseller Rebel with a Clause and the subject of a new docu-comedy by Brandt Johnson, also called Rebel with a Clause, currently playing at theaters around the country. You’ll find a complete collection of her columns for the WSR — HERE.
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“Rover ate the pancakes that Carol had prepared for her mother.”
Carol’s mother or Rover’s mother?
To me, carol’s mother. Because typically rover is a boy dog’s name so it can’t be *her* mother.
Carol’s mother? Or her mother’s mother? i.e. Carol’s grandmother.
For purposes of the issue being discussed here, it doesn’t make a difference.
Grammar is being discussed. Grammar is used to make things clearer. In this case the correct use of “grammarmath” inadvertently hides another linguistic pitfall. Seems like fair game to me.
Good on you!!
Me is one of them guys which love grammer.
Will save this succinct and clear exposition for future reference. Thank you!
When in doubt about using singular vs plural, my favorite advice on this subject (from a professor of English literature) is to ‘avoid that construction’. One of the dogs ate Carol’s mom’s pancake. Rover is one of the three dogs that stole Carol’s mom’s pancake. No problem.
Passive sentences. Get rid the the have/has. They darn dogs stole the pancakes.
That isn’t passive. It’s present perfect, active voice.
Regardless, the dog stole the pancake. “Has stolen/have stolen” is poor usage. The past tense of steal is an action that occurred at a precise point in the past. It did not start in the past and continue into the present. Compare: The act of stealing has existed since the beginning of time.
“Seventy-two chocolate lava cakes are plural and require a plural verb..”
Shouldn’t it be “is singular,” because it’s only one phrase that’s being described? Or would that only be if the phrase was in quotes? Aren’t the quotes implied, because cakes can’t actually be plural (although they can be chocolate; and the WORD “cakes” is plural)?
This presents, very nicely, the concept fundamental to symbolic logic of use versus mention. Without quotation marks, the phrase refers to a collection of cakes, for which a plural verb is required. (You are *using* the words to represent cakes, not just “mentioning” them as words.)
With quotation marks, however, you are no longer talking about cakes (“use”) but about a collection of *words* (“mention”), and that collection of words — which is only one single collection of words — therefore needs a singular verb.
So for these purposes, and precision in language, quotation marks cannot be “implied”. You are talking about either cakes (“use”) or words (“mention”), and need quotation marks in the latter instance to distinguish it from the former.
I would normally have put the quotation marks, but I left them off intentionally and went plural on the cakes!
At 78 I have always been very sensitive to grammatical errors.I have noticed many of us use I as the object of a preposition, it grates on my ears!
Examples :
Please come with my mother and I.
There was a terrible argument between my friend and I.
Use of the subjunctive has virtually disappeared!
I read recently that using who instead of whom is perfectly acceptable grammatically today.
Currently, there are many events worldwide that should take precedence over grammar niceties , however, I wanted to respond to this subject
Wow, you really think you’re the hoi polloi, don’t you? /s lol, jes’ joshin’.
I think people started saying “I” instead of “me” because it sounds more hifalutin.
I remember Eugenie in French class when the topic had been singular-plural agreement. “Jules et Jim partent aux Canadas.”
Teacher: Comment? Because Jules and Jim are two, there are two Canadas?
Was this written or just oral? It should be “Jules et Jim partent au Canada”. Sounds the same, though.
As an English major in both high school and college, I was taught a simpler way to make this determination: in the absence of commas, always use the latter “group.” In this case, one could say “One percent” LOVES, or “my classmates” LOVE. Since “my classmates” is the last “group” to be mentioned, and there are no commas in the sentence, you use “my classmates” and thus use LOVE.
I ain’t never been too good at nunna that there angle-ish.
Ellen,
“Singular English verbs end in s (‘John conjugates’), whereas plural verbs do not (‘johns conjugate’)”
Well, in general! You focus — indeed, we focus — on the rule, not the exception, at least most of the time.
While John conjugates, johns congregate … but I digress.
So in the sentence, “One percent of the people who read this article needs (or need) an aspirin.” LOL I love your writing.
in one of the recent baseball competitions, the Yankees is the loser.
— WAS the loser. 🙂
Associated Press does not know this.