Singular or Plural?

Here’s a headline from the local paper:

Shouldn’t that be “has been identified”?

No! The subject of the sentence is “all,” which is a plural when you’re counting something. (It can be singular when you’re measuring. “All of my pudding is gone.”)

Well, “one body recovered from Downard Funeral Home” is rather long, giving you time to forget the actual subject, and to want to make the verb agree with “body.” (This is called attraction, by the way.)

So be alert!

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English has a fairly common error when someone makes the number (singular or plural) of a verb agree with the closest noun even when the verb doesn’t refer to that noun. This is called attraction. You can do this in Latin, I’m told, but not in English.

Here’s an example of incorrectly avoiding the habit of attraction:

Smart grids are a management system that use a combination of sensors and AI to distribute and conserve energy. 

https://www.morningbrew.com/emerging-tech for September 3, 2021

“Grids” is plural (hence “grids are”), and “use” is plural, but “use” doesn’t refer to “grids”! “Use” applies to “system,” which is singular. It should be “…system that uses…”

So this writer, normally alert enough to avoid this error of attraction, overdid their caution! So be alert, not just cautious.

I might have addressed “none” before, but this example strikes me as a good illustration of the effect of context.

After all, none is a contraction of “not (even) one.” That’s a singular, right? But the context of the word often says none of [a group of something], and we grab that plural object of “of” to signal the number of “none.” Technically, this is incorrect. We get the number of a verb from its subject, not from some modifying phrase. This is easier to say if you take out that prepositional phrase: “None is how many cookies you get before supper.”

Well, how about this example? Last panel:

Singular doesn’t feel right, does it? If she had said “not one,” the singular feels better…

Singular subjects get a singular verb, right? And plural subjects get a plural verb. (We call this agreement.) So is the subject of this sentence singular or plural?

Let’s be technical: “1” is the subject of the sentence, and it’s a singular. “8 couples” is a plural, but it’s the object of the preposition “in.”

Now let’s be, um, poetic: “1 in 8 couples” obviously refers to a group of people, especially since we’re referring to a large population of people. We can be metaphorical and call the whole phrase the subject of the sentence semantically, right? So we could use a plural verb, right?

What do you think? Feel free to add something in the comments.

Here’s the picture from the article:

Maybe I just feel curmudgeonly today. You can decipher the sentence, maybe, but it takes a while to figure out what’s wrong with it. Here’s the sentence:

“Shield” should jump right out at you as incorrect: it should be “shields,” to go with “decades-old law,” right? So why did a professional writer (and editor, I presume) use the plural, “shield”? I think to go with the plural “changes” in the second line. But “the decades-old law” interferes! Especially since we see only one comma, which separates that plural verb (shield) from the plural (changes) and puts it with the closer singular (law). But putting a comma after “law” makes the sentence sound awkward. (The rule is that two commas count as zero commas.) And what if the intention was to use “shields,” which changes the meaning of the whole sentence!

A bad sentence no matter what you do to it. How would you fix this?

Here’s my solution:

Frank Pallone Jr., the chairman of the committee hosting the hearing, said he wants to explore making some changes to Section 230 to shield tech companies from lawsuits over posts, videos, and photos that people share on their platforms. The law is decades old.

Maybe the sentence means the opposite:

Frank Pallone Jr., the chairman of the committee hosting the hearing, said he wants to explore making some changes to Section 230 because it shields tech companies from lawsuits over posts, videos, and photos that people share on their platforms. The law is decades old.

Make the reference to the age of the section into a separate sentence.

Here’s a picture of the CEOs scheduled for the hearing. I don’t have a shot of Mr. Pallone.:

PS—I fixed the missing oxford comma, too. Did you notice?