A word, please
I was not a particularly word-savvy child. My childhood was less “Gulliver’s Travels” than it was “Gilligan’s Island.” But one phenomenon I encountered could consistently pique my linguistic curiosity: It seemed that every cartoon caveman and rudely caricatured Indian said stuff like “Me ride horse” and “He go there.” And though I had no concept of terms like “subject-verb agreement” and “object pronoun” (I was more steeped in terminology like “Plop, plop, fizz, fizz” and “I can’t believe I ate the whole thing”), I sensed a qualitative difference between these two types of errors. The “me ride …” constructions seemed completely implausible. I found it hard to believe that even someone struggling with the language would confuse “me” with “I.” Considering that I was gullible enough to enjoy stories involving coconut radios and women whose hair remained perfectly coiffed after years on a deserted island, that’s really saying something.
The other type of “error” – the “he go” type – seemed more realistic. In fact, it seemed to open up a can of worms. “Dogs sit” but “dog sits,” and I couldn’t really grasp why. Now, with my brain partially recovered from years of mushifying TV, I can.
Subject-verb agreement is, in most cases, intuitive for native English speakers. We need not stop to think why we don’t say “they goes” or “he am” to get it right anyway. But in other cases subject-verb agreement isn’t so easy.
Look at these two sentences: “It is the resourceful nature of the castaways that lead/leads to new sources of hairspray.” “One in seven castaways is/are called Little Buddy.”
If you’re reading this column instead of watching bad sitcoms, chances are you’re sharp enough to see that the correct choices are “leads” and “is.” But you can also see why such constructions are potentially confusing. They make it a little harder to nail down the true subject of each sentence. Therefore, it’s harder to know how to conjugate your verb.
In the first example, there are two nouns that appear to be competing for top billing in their clause: “nature,” which is singular, and “castaways,” which is plural. The trick is to figure out which one is actually performing the action in the verb.
Prepositions are a big help. That’s because they introduce prepositional phrases, which in these kinds of constructions often work as “postmodifiers” of nouns and adjectives. That is, they are working as descriptors that come after the word they’re describing. In doing so, they relegate themselves to the status of mere adjectives, so to speak, and thereby point to our real subjects.
In “nature of castways,” that “of” tells us that the second noun, “castaways,” is really just part of a compound that’s working to add description. Therefore, the true subject of our clause is “nature.” And since nature is singular, we know our correct sentence is, “It is the resourceful nature of castaways that leads to new sources of hairspray.”
For constructions like “one in seven,” people often rely on intuition to know how to conjugate the verb. It’s usually clear that the speaker is focusing on the one and not on the seven. So it’s easy to see that it’s “One in seven castaways is called Little Buddy” and not “are called.”
Yet the preposition trick is always available. In “one in seven,” there are two potential subjects, though they’re fully spelled out. They are “one castaway” and “seven castaways.” But our preposition trick works even if we focus just on the “one” and the “seven.” Because “seven” is the object of the preposition “in,” we can see it’s part of a prepositional phrase enlisted in service to a more important word — the true subject of our clause — one (castaway).
And if you made it all the way to the end of this column, you’ve earned the right to say, “Me go watch much TV now.”
— June Casagrande is author of “Grammar Snobs Are Great Big Meanies.” She can be reached at word@grammarsnobs.com.