A word, please
The ink is not yet dry on the Writers Guild contract and already I’m itching for new fight. Not that I was one of the striking writers, mind you. I just enjoy watching a good tussle. Plus, seeing the word “writers” in the newspaper next to pictures of people who can afford matching T-shirts gave me hope. So with the writers back to work and the presidential primaries looking more and more like a two-man love fest (Miss you, Ralph Nader), I have no choice but to stir up my own trouble. That’s right, I’m talking about disagreement — the grammatical kind.
Imagine, if you will, a world in which sentence subjects are in nonstop conflict with other parts of their sentences — a world where thousands of couples live in the same house, where every man in the world shares but one necktie, where contractors all have the same clients and keep all their names on a single sheet of paper. Welcome to the wonderfully contentious world of copy editing.
Take this sentence, which I came across in a real-life article written by a real-live professional writer: “Reputable contractors normally maintain a list of satisfied customers.”
See a problem? (With the language, I mean, not with the plausibility of terms like “reputable contractor” and “satisfied customer.”) This sentence says that contractors, plural, maintain a list, singular. Though it’s clear what the writer meant, what he actually said was that every reputable contractor in the world shares with colleagues a single list.
I’m not picking on one writer. This is not a glaring and shameful flaw shared by a few flawed wordsmiths. This is an epidemic. And it can claim and confound even the best of writers.
Take this sentence: “When shopping for a necktie, men should look for muted colors.”
It implies that multiple men shop for a single necktie, even though it’s clear that’s not the writer’s intent. But how do you fix it? Do you create a singular subject for your sentence? “When shopping for a necktie, a man should look for muted colors.” Do you further pound your point by inserting the word “each”: “each man.” Do you change “necktie” to “neckties.” Do you abandon using a third-person subject and instead go for the second person, “When shopping for a necktie, you …”? Do you look at the pictures next to old newspaper articles about the writers’ strike and wonder whether anyone wears neckties anymore anyway?
Yes, yes, yes and yes. There’s no formula for avoiding such agreement problems. All you can do is keep a watchful eye and, when you see these problems in your own writing, consider all the options.
“Garner’s Modern American Usage” calls this problem “subject-complement disagreement.” And to give you an idea of how many people are privy to this problem, I’ll let you guess how many hits I got when I used this term for a Google search. Just one. It was a direct citation of “Garner’s.”
Subject-verb disagreement is better known. This term refers to situations in which a verb isn’t conjugated for the same number and person as the subject. For example, “Every one of us have a role to play” instead of “has.”
But while subject-verb agreement is better-known, it’s not necessarily better understood. A Google search of this term took me straight to a 1993 “On Language” column by William Safire in which he cited the year’s “prime example of subject-verb disagreement.” The quotation Safire was criticizing was, “We encourage everyone, in every area of the company, to share their ideas.” Safire added, “I know you want to avoid the sexist ‘his,’ but ‘their’ doesn’t go with ‘everyone’; try ‘all our employees’ instead.”
Safire knows a lot more about language than I do, so it is with no small pleasure that I say: Sorry, Billy. That’s not subject-verb disagreement. That’s pronoun-antecedent disagreement.
And with that, my itch for a fight has been scratched — for now.
– June Casagrande is author of “Grammar Snobs Are Great Big Meanies.” She can be reached at word@grammarsnobs.com.