That Makes Two

When you make up a word, you get to decide about its spelling. “Lego,” for instance, doesn’t have a plural spelling. If you want a plural, it’s “Lego pieces.”

Turns out “Jedi” is the same way. Next-to-last panel.

I’m not sure whether I already knew that or not…

Subscribe to this blog's RSS feed

First the puzzle: Is the spider’s sentence correct?

Okay, “all” here means he dreams about only one thing. That’s singular, right? So the verb should be “is,” right?

Then why does “is” sound wrong, and “are” sound right? Think about it before you read the next paragraph.

The reason is called attraction. It’s a legitimate rule in Latin, but not in English, though sometimes it happens. Attraction is when you base the form of a word to agree with the closest candidate (even if it’s incorrect). And “flies” is closer to the verb than the subject is.

“All” is one of those words that can go either way. So look at the context!

Here’s an example of getting it wrong:

A handful of buildings and mining relics are all that remains today of the once-thriving mining town of Russell Gulch, Colorado.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/ghost-town-disc-golf

The writer got the sentence partly right. The sentence has a compound subject (“handful” and “relics”) and he used a plural main verb (“are” instead of “is”), but he used a singular verb in the noun clause (“all that remains”). Since “all” refers to more than one thing, it’s a plural, so the correct noun clause is “all that remain.”

Things like mass nouns (i.e. uncountable) are singular. You might say “all of the wheat is ground up,” for example.

So be careful with all that you write.

By the way, here’s a picture of some of the town, but not all of it.

Some words can go either way, depending on how they fit into your sentence. I ran into this pair of sentences in an excellent book I just finished, page 217:

The estimated global migrant population is about 244 million, about 3.3% of global population. In other words, 96.7% of humanity continue to reside in their country of birth.

A population (of 224 million) gets a perfectly correct singular verb even though it refers to millions of people (“population” is singular; 224 million is the object of “of.”). But then we have “humanity,” also a singular noun, in front of a plural verb, “continue.”

What’s up? Well, “humanity” is the object of “of,” so it doesn’t count. The actual subject of the verb is “percent.” I guess being 96.7 percent is strong enough to make it a plural.

What do you think?

I’ve heard of two grammar errors frequently attributed to grocers. One is putting unnecessary quotes around words in signs. The other is incorrect apostrophes to make plurals.

I don’t think the skunk is a grocer, but that’s the error. Maybe the cartoonist wanted to make the skunk seem lower class, no offense to grocers. Next-to-last panel:

The rule: You don’t need an apostrophe for plurals!

This post first appeared on The Writing Rag.