Plurally or Singularly? That is the question.
Thursday, December 30, 2010 at 21:39 I love this sort of discussion, but really at the end of the day, it comes down to useage being fluid and constantly evolving. I’ll still wince at the current, common useage of ‘impact’… such as “the impact of her mother’s words”. Have we banned ‘effect’ from the dictionary?
-maven
From the Columbia Journalism Review:
Just One of Those Things: Choosing between the singular and plural
By Merrill Perlman
Be the hit of your holiday party! Amaze your friends! Impress your family! Be one of those people who uses the correct verb in the phrasing of “one of those”!
Of course, unless one of those people are really steeped in English, not many are likely to notice that in both of those “one of those” phrases, the verb was wrong. For now, at least.
Many people learned that prepositional phrases—many of which start with “of”—drop out of the equation when deciding on how to make the verb agree with its subject. So if you wrote “The box of cookies on the counter (is or are) mine,” you were told that the subject was “box,” so you wanted the singular verb “is”—the plural in “of cookies” didn’t count.
That’s pretty straightforward. But when you replace “box” with “one,” the phrasing becomes one of those things that always (confuses or confuse?) us.
To figure out whether the verb should be singular or plural, some people will think “of those things” is prepositional, and will do what their English teachers said to do: Say “One … confuses us.” They’d make “one” the subject, and so the verb would be singular.
And they’d be wrong.