Singular or Plural?

Last panel. He mentions two things, then uses a singular verb. Is he wrong?

English is flexible. Sometimes we combine more than one thing into a single group. We often use a word for the group. For example, “the class is seated” but “the students are seated.” But sometimes we use the number of the verb to tell how we refer to the number of something. Be careful, though—doing this can mess up your sentence.

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I’ll let you decide on this one. Here’s what stimulated my question:

Using the plural verb “know” just doesn’t feel right, but a family typically has more that one person in it…

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.

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:

Here’s the sentence. Think about the highlighted verbs before you read what’s below.

Okay, “accompanies” and “means” are singular verbs. What might be their subject or subjects?

“Accompanies” is close to “reports, studies, and press releases,” but that’s a plural! So “blizzard,” a singular, has to be the subject. The blizzard accompanies a COP.

What about “means”? Looks like “blizzard has to be its subject, too. So the blizzard accompanies and means something. Awkward, but technically it could be grammatical.

But what about that nice list? You could say that they accompany a COP, especially since they’re objects of a preposition with a relative clause right after it.

I think if the list did the accompanying and the blizzard should mean something gets buried; after all, it’s a blizzard!

What’s your opinion?