The Issue is S-V Agreement

Or maybe disagreement. In English we have sepaate verb forms for connection with singular or plural nouns. Plural verb goes with plural nouns, singular with singular. First panel:

The verb is “comes,” which is the singular form. but we have two girls, clearly a plural. Wrong verb. I kind of apologize to our non-English-speaking friends that we use -s for the singular third person verb form and -s for the plurals of nouns.

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Here’s how one guy, Zach Weinersmith, does it. Second panel. Only two panels appear here. Click the link to see the whole comic.

It sounds wrong, but I’m not sure how else to do it. What’s your advice?

Unlike many languages, adjectives in English say almost nothing about the words they modify. Not gender, and not number. Adjectives don’t say whether the word they refer to is plural, so we don’t have a plural form for adjectives. Here’s an incorrect sentence from an astronomy article:

Massive meteoroid strike on Mars creates 500-feet wide crater, unearths boulder-sized blocks of water ice.

https://interestingengineering.com/science/meteoroid-strike-mars-water-ice

So it’s a “500-foot wide crater.” Adjectives stay singular. Harrumpf.

Here’s a picture:

Part of good writing is to be unambiguous. Sometimes you need an apostrophe to make a plural sound right. See the last word in this comic:

The apostrophe makes you pronounce it “prose” which is plural of “pro.” Without the apostrophe, it’s “pros,” which you might be inclined to pronounce “pross.”

This doesn’t happen very often. When I run into another example, I’ll post it.

The word “cochlea” is like the word “fish.” Singular and plural are the same. Here’s the text that made me think of this. It’s from Scientific American December 2022, page 46.

So there you have it!

Here are two pictures. I googled them. You’ve probably seen something like these: