Disagreeing to Agree

[A column that appeared in the September 2011 Vocabula Review.]

1

I

s it just me, or have failures of subject-verb agreement been on the uptick recently? Here is an example from the New York Times:

*As Karen Dynan of the Brookings Institution has found, well over half of the decline in the nation’s debt levels are due to foreclosures and consumer credit write-downs . . .
(July 31, 2011)

And one from the Decatur Herald and Review, here in Illinois:

*A compromise solution, such as the one put together by the “Gang of Six” senators, have been rejected.
(July 31, 2011)

In the first case, “are” should be “is,” of course, to agree with the long noun phrase “well . . . levels”;   in the second, which leaps off the page, “have” should be “has,” to agree with “solution” [not “senators,” for pity’s sake!]

I keep poor notes, or I could furnish endless further examples, for I have been noticing this problem again and again. The blunder seems especially common in a situation that is admittedly a little tricky, when a linking verb joins a singular subject to a plural complement.

*The thing we truly care about are jobs, jobs, jobs.

*The weak point in the Democrats’ argument are the hundreds of broken promises that have brought us to this point.

Is! of course, and again, is! Handbooks, those great unused treasuries, explain that the verb must agree with the subject, not the complement: a fine, firm principle that carries the day even if the subject is so abstract that it seems neither plural nor singular in itself:

*What troubles Progressives are the many unexpected concessions the President made in the negotiations.

Not are, is!  But I have been encountering specimens like this one so often I suspect an increase in more than my own tendency to notice. To many people, it seems, the single-ness of the noun clause “what troubles Progressives” is less than obvious, or at any rate, less dispositive than the plural-ness of concessions.

There are many other troublesome and borderline cases, which the handbooks work through in a systematic way that is oddly satisfying to the teacher, though the students will soon be making faces if she actually tries to teach that chapter. Collective nouns cause trouble:

*The marching band have gone home.

*The buffalo herd migrate in the fall and spring.

But either sentence might be correct over in England, where usage differs, and the gang are less likely to be seen as a single lump. Compound subjects are a fruitful source of nuance and difficulty, requiring several pages of handbook discussion. Such prophylaxis notwithstanding, even as excellent a writer as Jeffrey Toobin can slip, in a brilliant article on Clarence Thomas in the August 29 New Yorker:

*Thomas wrote a concurring opinion, which laid out a template that he, and to some extent the Court, has since followed.

Toobin and his editor seem to be treating the bit between the commas as if it were a parenthetical, rather than noticing that “the Court” joins “he” as the other half of the verb’s compound subject. Their interpretation is interesting but wrong.

Elsewhere in the agreement chapter, indefinite pronouns pose special cases that have to be settled one by one — and of course some that keep coming unsettled. The handbooks and I favor none is, but none are seems be gaining ground. And the increasing use of they/them/their in a singular sense may be working back through the system to pluralize the indefinites, so that eventually we will face such horrors as nobody are and everybody have. (It will happen so gradually that, like frogs being  boiled, we hardly notice.)

But the most common source of subject-verb disagreement, by far, is the occurrence somewhere between those two elements of a noun that disagrees in number with the subject; that is, it’s plural if the subject is singular or vice versa. Here is an invented but I think fairly typical example:

*The fact that a small but determined minority of members can trample not just the wishes but the reasoned arguments of their colleagues for weeks on end give us cause for real concern.

The writer looks back from give/gives in search of the grammatical subject and  sees “weeks,” “colleagues,” “wishes,” and “members,” and his courage fails before he makes it to “fact.”  An argument for a revival of sentence diagramming, if you like: but were such missteps really rarer in the old days of more buttoned-down English classes?  My habit in such cases, back when I still read student papers for a living, was simply to circle the verb and the subject and connect them with a line, passing on without further comment, not greatly annoyed because, after all, this student was attempting a sentence of some complexity and should be encouraged. (Really. There is far too much Dick-and-Jane prose in undergraduate papers, taking ages to make the simplest points, fulfilling the length requirement before real thought has begun.)

But sentences like the two first quoted are more bothersome. Here is the second of them again:

*A compromise solution, such as the one put together by the “Gang of Six” senators, have been rejected.

In this case the English teacher, poor devil that he is, tired and wanting to get this batch done and watch a little Leno before bed, may take a moment nonetheless and scribble, “Solution HAS, of course,” or “Proofread more carefully,” or something still more icy and splenetic. If the heaviness of his own red strokes surprises him, he may then mutter that, for crying out loud, the error is so obvious that it seems deliberate.

Deliberate, yes: this, I want to say, is the crux of one’s irritation. Suspected volition changes the mistake from a sin to a heresy, from an accident to a challenge, from funny or pitiable to strangely troubling. Language proceeds by endless imitation; every sentence is a model for countless other sentences, and in that sense, whatever else we may be talking about, we are also talking about language itself. Like it or not, to say something is to take a stand on how that thing should be said. On this level of meta-communication, the speaker of our sample sentence is impudently and seductively whispering: Has, have, who cares? You get my meaning, don’t you? We don’t really need two forms of this verb.

Part of the trouble, as always, is that the Philistine has substantial reason on his side. Quick, try the following: change the sentence from present (or present-perfect) to simple past, but preserve the error.  You can’t!

A compromise solution, such as the one put together by the “Gang of Six” senators, had been rejected. [Fine.]

Compromise solutions, such as the one put together by the “Gang of Six” senators, had been rejected. [No problemo.]

You inevitably choose had because there is no competing form. In the past tense, to have and most other English verbs already dispense with the inflection that, in the third person present, reaffirms the number of the subject. Yet we get along fine without it, relying purely on syntax to tell us who does what. So why not do likewise in the present tense? Indeed, backwoods and inner city English already seem to have made this choice. The following are correct, or at least perfectly ordinary, on their own turf, though I would circle them without hesitation in a college paper:

He have all kinda trouble with that coon hound.

She meet with her boss today about that raise.

John discuss that all the time.

What troubles the teacher is not that the “obvious” error is illogical, but that it is all too logical, making its case, citing precedent, unsettling a fragile compromise that is, nonetheless, The Way We Are Doing Things Just Now. It is perceived insurgency that makes her grit her teeth: those old what-are-we-coming-to blues, that feeling that the language is about to unravel.

Linguists, of course, would tell her to relax. They mostly take an Olympian view, insisting that “change is normal” (as the case was put in a famous apologia for Webster’s Third New International Dictionary) and that we always deal with it just fine, indeed, quite brilliantly if we are not distracted by the false laws of the traditional grammarian. In the specific matter of subject-verb disagreements, linguists might rub their collective chin and point out that the few remaining inflected forms in English ultimately derive from the glorious eight-case system of Proto-Indo-European (c. 4000 BC), that nearly all Western languages have been dropping case endings ever since (down to six in classical Latin, then four in late Latin, on down to barely two in modern English), that no real harm or confusion ever comes from it (because speakers always adjust), and that, in short, you shouldn’t worry. These are fascinating, valid notions in their place, but their value to speakers and writers trying to choose effective phrasing right now is precisely zero. That is the grammarian’s game, always messier and chancier.

But I often wish I could take the linguist’s advice. Life might be simpler if I could turn off the small internal alarm that sounds whenever the talking heads perpetrate the mistake du jour. It is never a question of real misunderstanding, after all.

*What our situation require are many small adjustments in the larger strategy.  

*The President and his Cabinet believes the essence of the problem are the tax cuts made in 2001.

But I can’t do it; the bell rings insistently, for me and for many others, surely a majority of Vocabula Review readers, quite likely a majority (still) of all English speakers. Our cavil is no hoity-toity affectation, no quarrel we are going out of our way to pick with the spontaneous natural usage of others. For us it is the mistake that is unnatural, a pointless aggression against received usage.

And even those who might sharply disagree in this case would prove equally fastidious in others. We are all inhabited (some more, some less) by a peevish genie of correctness that aims to keep language steady and consistent, down to the tiniest details. Given all its own way, this surly spirit would no doubt stifle innovation and creativity and make language too aridly formal. But luckily it works in tandem with the opposite impulse, a fiery inventiveness that focuses on getting the thing said no matter the cost to language itself. And together the two demons get along quite handsomely, shaping language to the needs of the moment but also preserving its intelligibility for the long term. Particular issues in usage shift and shift again, as do the answers given, but this tug-of-war between opposite impulses — between utility and correctness, self-expression and grammaticality, innovation and continuity, parole and langue — goes on and on because it is implicit in speech itself. If the prescriptivist curmudgeon at one end of the rope ever dropped it, the hippie poet (or descriptive linguist) at the other end would fall over backwards, and no one would be happy.

2

Discussions of correctness in language tend to shift quietly back and forth between two different senses of the term that, in a strong light, seem actually quite different. In the first, simpler case, “correct” means “adequately performed according to noncontroversial standards.” Only the speaker’s competence is in question, not the language itself.

But in the second case, correctness has to do with competing usages and dialects, and things can get ugly. A large part of what has given English teachers and prescriptive grammarians a bad name in some circles is that, in trying to address the first kind of correctness, we stumble into the second. In trying to teach students only what we think they want to know — how to speak, what this means, what sounds right — we end up imposing the standards of an imperious preferred dialect on the divergent dialect they find natural. In the process we seem to question their competency and peg them as outsiders, so we soon find ourselves in the doghouse.

I had a conversation like that not long ago with my granddaughter, who is older now. She said something like, “Me and Ethan are going to the pool,” and I took a stab at selling her on “I” as the correct subject pronoun.  “‛Ethan and I,’ you mean?”  She looked at me. “Why do you tell me that?”

And suddenly I was back on my heels a bit. “Well, that’s considered the correct way. In school, at least, that’s the way you’re supposed to say it, and lots of people do. ‘Ethan and I.’” She thought it over for a moment and said firmly, “I say ‘me and Ethan.’” She knew perfectly well what sounded natural in her ears, what she hears every day here in Beantown, Illinois, proud home of Soybean State University. And that was that. I had exactly the same experience with her mother, by the way, a quarter of a century before, trying to convince her to say “by accident” instead of “on accident.” Everything you have heard about kids listening to their peers not their parents is true.

But it’s best not to be too dogmatic about usage when you are talking with someone who might still be around fifty years from now. What is correct today might not be correct tomorrow, even if, today, it was noncontroversial. The inevitability of linguistic variation and change used to be taken by some linguists and even a few English teachers as an argument for complete laissez-faire, an undiscriminating acceptance of all usage as equally correct. But the fallacy here is blatant. Of course you can depart from a shared norm a little bit and still be understood; but do so repeatedly, with never any correction or recoil, and soon no one is understanding anyone. Conventions in themselves are arbitrary, but the need to have them — to settle certain issues just to have them settled — is absolute.

And all this is something we know in our bones: for without ever thinking about it, we react to innocent solecism amiably and indulgently, but greet ambitious solecism with sudden annoyance and punitive bad temper. It seems that we chattering bipeds are wired not just to learn language and use it, but to preserve it in good shape as a social property. Which, when you think about it, only makes sense. Why have one instinct without the other?

Go ahead and mark the error. Firmly. In red.