This Plural is a Singular

You probably get this right, but it jumped out at me, so I thought I’d point it out. It’s a headline:

Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota sets June date for office return; CEO says flexibility will be key

At first I expected the plural form of the verb, “set,”but everybody knows that Blue Cross and Blue Shield is a single company, so the singular verb, “sets” is appropriate.

Easy lesson today.

Subscribe to this blog's RSS feed

Some things can be both singular and plural. My brain is singular, but my brains are inside my skull. Except for number, the terms are pretty much interchangeable.

Here’s an unrelated of something being plural, but we treat it as singular.

From the ages and sizes of animals, archaeologists can deduce the populations of herds in terms of age and sex ratios, all of which reveals how herding differed from hunting.

https://aeon.co/essays/revolutionary-archaeology-reveals-the-deepest-possible-anthropocene

Okay, we have lots of plurals here: ages and sizes, archaeologists, populations, herds, age and sex ratios. But we have a singular verb, reveals! Why? Because they got combined into a single group, all.

American English does this a lot. “Team” is singular, and other collective nouns. The British don’t. (Hmm. Here I have an apparently singular word, “British,” but it’s a plural.) I feel sorry for people who have to learn English.

Sorry, I don’t have a good picture to go with this lesson. How do you picture something that’s simultaneously singular and plural?

All that said, I found a goof in the same article:

The increasingly sophisticated use and analysis of ancient DNA now allows researchers to track the development and distribution of domesticated animals and crops in great detail.

In this case we have a compound subject, which counts as a plural, even if the elements of the compound are singular. So they should have a plural verb, “allow,” not “allows.” Harrumpf.

Here’s the passage. I’ll put the words I’m writing about in bold.

The results show that during 2014 to 2018, about half the amount of warm water travelling northwards towards the Arctic Ocean actually flows though the Rockall Trough.

Historical data from the region suggest that this is not always the case, with more water flowing through the Iceland Basin to the west in other years. 

NationalOceanographyCentre@public.govdelivery.com newsletter for September 25, 2020, referring to https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2020JC016403

(“Travelling” has two l’s because the National Oceanography Centre is in England.)

So should “data” be singular or plural? Technically, the word is a plural (the singular is “datum”). You mainly see the word used as a plural in scientific writing, I suppose because they like to be technically correct and they use Latin a lot. But “data” refers to a group of um, datums, and “group” is singular. So in informal writing, you can get away with using “data” as a singular.

But use “data” as a plural if you want to be really really correct.

Here’s a picture of the data-collecting instrument:

PS—I could have said “data points” or “results” instead of “datums.” “Datums” is funnier.

The rule for agreement is that a singular subject gets a singular verb, and plural subject gets a plural verb—even when a differently numbered phrase intervenes. But exceptions exist!

Sometimes a plural can be treated as a singular. In the past I mentioned that some company names, that end in “& Co.” are treated as singulars.

Here’s a sentence (from a Facebook post, so I can’t link to it) in which the writer, Dr. Bill Stillwell, an MD, defines a plural as a singular:

Renal damage, up to 50% of ICU patients was also seen, possibly from the high concentrations of ACE2 receptors found in the kidneys (used by the virus to effect cell entry) and 5-10% of patients required dialysis.

What was seen? Not the patients (plural), but the damage (singular). (Myself, I’d have inserted “in” before “up.”)

Here’s another one, on page 75 of the March 2020 Scientific American. It’s a bit trickier:

Our concepts of how the two and a half pounds of flabby flesh between our ears accomplish learning date to Ivan Pavlov’s classic experiments, where he found that dogs could learn to salivate at the sound of a bell.

The writer is obviously referring to the brain, a single thing, even though he called it a number of pounds of flesh, a plural.

Was he right? “Pounds” is plural, but they don’t act separately (do they?). Feel free to comment in the comments.

Okay, they should make her look more glamorous, because she’s got good grammar technique! (Am I biased???) She’s suggesting they take out the plural to see how their sentence sounds.

The grammar rule is to use the objective case (me) after a preposition. We get this correct when the object is alone, but for some reason, people often don’t do this when they have a compound object.

Make her look more like my wife.