Singular or Plural Verb?

The two regular readers of this humble site probably recall that I studied Greek in my youth. When I saw the first panel of this strip, I thought of something that had not occurred to me in all these years. Was the verb plural to go with wages, or is it singular to go with death? So I rushed to the original of the passage quotes on that sign, Romans 6:23. Then I read the rest of the comic, to discover that the comic was about that very topic! Here’s the comic, Barney & Clyde:

Okay, here’s what I found out: In Greek and many other languages, it’s okay to leave out the verb “to be” in any of its many forms, and that’s what Paul of Tarsus did here. Basically, he wrote, “The wages of sin—death!” I’d be curious to know what he would have written if he had included the verb, but since it’s perfectly idiomatic to leave “is” and “are” out, I’ll bet he didn’t even consider including it. I’ll add, since we’re talking about Greek grammar, “sin” is singular, and there’s a rule in Greek and Latin called attraction, where a word picks up a form from the word that precedes it, regardless of the precise grammar. So maybe that’s why the translators felt comfortable using the singular verb in English, to go with the singular “sin.” And, as the comic suggests, “wages” is a collective noun, so you can treat it as a singular.

It’s a good punchy way to get the message across, though, isn’t it?

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Gotta show you the comic first—I didn’t notice the joke in this Argyle Sweater until I read the caption at the bottom.

Now you know why I wrote “letterplay” instead of “wordplay.” A palindrome is a situation where something has the same order of letters both backwards and forward. Punctuation and spaces don’t count.

And here’s the academics: “palin” (πάλιν) is Greek for “back” (in the sense of “again”) and “drome” (well, dromos (δρόμος), is Greek for “race,” which implies running.

So there you have it—a lesson in Classical Greek based on a comic.

Sometimes you can make your writing clearer by adding one or more modifiers. But be sure your added detail is necessary and meaningful. Saying you have a red car distinguishes it meaningfully from different cars (for example, of other colors) but often the word “different” by itself doesn’t carry a lot of content. The world being what it is, if you have another of something, it’s almost always a different one, so you’re not adding a lot of content to say “different.” I mentioned this in the past, so go there.

You have probably heard the tongue-in-cheek comment that someone is “a little bit pregnant.” Pregnancy is one of those things that either is or isn’t; you don’t have much choice of degree.

I just ran into another example of a not-very-meaningful modifier (emphasis mine):

It wasn’t however until Nov 1985 after a workshop that the first media report (in the NY Times) showed the NASA results (publishing another Oct 1983 map for a slightly different day).

They’re not talking about the weather, so I’m not sure that “slightly” means much. I mean, either its the same day or it’s a different day, right? Like being pregnant. Maybe they could be more explicit, saying something like “another day in the same week.”

Anyway, here’s the warning: Pay attention to your writing. And a tip: if you at all can, reread your work the next day. You’ll be able to give it a fresh look.

PS—Since I thought of it, I’ll add that Greek has an interesting way of handling “different.” They have two words, heteros, which means “another of a different kind.” Apples are heteros from horses, if you will. The other is allos, which means “another of the same kind.” My car is allos from your car.

Okay, back to work.

This is a grammar lesson of sorts. In school, you were not taught something about verbs because English doesn’t formalize it, but it’s important in several other languages, particularly Slavic languages and Hebrew (which is where I first learned about this).

The something is called Aspect.

Aspect is hard for me to define but it has something to do with tense, but not exactly. Tense is where in time you place something. “I run” is the simple present tense; it happens now. “I ran” is the simple past tense, it happened in the past. But what about “I am running” and “I was running”? We call these progressive tenses, but the difference between these and the simple past and present is aspect.

Let’s think about the simple present. It can refer to the future, sort of. “Click the × in the upper right corner. The window closes.” This is using the present tense of close to indicate that something is customary. This customariness is an aspect.

In high school, my favorite English teacher, Mrs. Baird taught us to conjugate verbs, and she had one form that included the helping verb “to be about to.” So we had “I am about to run.” I don’t remember what she called this form, and I have searched all over for it and can’t find it in a conjugation anywhere. Maybe it had something to do with her study of Sanskrit. Anyway, this seems to be another use of aspect.

Why am I writing about this rather abstruse subject? Well, for a while I was studying Greek and Hebrew at the same time, and it occurred to me that Greek verbs showed aspect, even though this was never mentioned in class. Then recently I ran into a scholarly article about aspect in Greek verbs! It’s so scholarly I won’t even link to the article, though if you want to take a look at it, email me and I’ll send you a pdf. To give you an idea what you would be in for, here are two sentences:

For the sake of simplicity this chapter focuses primarily on perfective and imperfective aspects, concerning which there is the most consensus among New Testament scholars, and on the indicative mood. However, it will be suggested that a time-relational approach also offers potential for explaining the aspect of the perfect and pluperfect tenses, and that of the future tense in the nonindicative moods.

So now you can say you know something about English that almost nobody else knows!

Your grammar reveals social status—which side of the tracks you are from. Demonstrated by this Rubes comic, sort of.

Beware those double negatives! Though only the grammar police would try to interpret this as a positive. I might add that in classical Greek, a double negative was interpreted as a strong negative.

By the way, English has one double positive that means a negative. The expression “yeah, right.”