“He is one of the people who consistently supports our positions.” That’s how Jim Sedlak, director of public policy for the American Life League, described John Ashcroft, President-elect George W.

It’s spring cleaning time — an opportunity to sweep out dust bunnies lurking in recesses of recent reading. Let’s start with various forms of disagreement between singular and plural elements in a ...

What is happening to the English language? I learned the difference between singular and plural nouns while in elementary school. That was reinforced during middle school, high school and college. It ...

The couple is going to purchase the house? Or the couple are going to purchase the house? Even after all my years of editing, I can still get tripped up trying to make verbs agree with collective ...

Should you say a person’s whereabouts "is" unknown or "are" unknown? Dictionaries say "whereabouts" is one of those words that may be used with either a singular or a plural verb. One reference book ...

Some keen-eared Radio National listeners recently took issue with the following sentence, delivered on a book review program: "There's heartbreaking scenes in Murakami's new novel." It's not that the ...

However, there are many types of noun and noun phrase in English, and it can be difficult to know if a particular noun takes a singular verb (such as DOES / HAS / AM / IS ) or a plural verb (DO / HAVE ...

One of the earliest and most useful grammar rules in English is that a verb should always agree with its subject in both person and number. Stated more simply, singular subjects should take verbs in ...

We can use singular or plural verbs with many collective nouns, Pamela, and government is one of these. Singular and plural forms are often mixed as are the pronouns that refer back to the nouns in ...

I’m always careful with the word “none.” Whenever it’s the subject of a clause, I take special care with the verb. The choice between “none is” and “none are,” for example, can raise a lot of eyebrows ...

As terse as they normally are, newspaper headlines are designed to get your attention by, as much as possible, summarizing the main body text. Two words in last week’s headline of this column; ...