A Word, Please: Singular vs. plural? That's the question
His question: 'Am I wrong or is the grammar on her T-shirt wrong? I've looked it up and checked it online and can't find a definitive answer.'
He didn't mention what the grammar issue was, but in my view, there could be only one: the word 'are,' a plural verb, instead of the singular verb 'is.'
If 'minority' is a singular noun, then you can't use a plural verb with it. That would be the equivalent of saying 'The dog are in the house' or 'Maria are here.' Classic subject-verb agreement problem.
But is it? Like my friend, whom I'll call Richard because that's his name, I looked it up. I must have given Richard good advice in years past, because he apparently is part of the small minority who knows you can find answers to tricky plural-vs.-singular questions in the dictionary.
For example, look up the word 'ethics,' skim a few lines and you'll see the note 'often used in plural, but singular or plural in construction.' So, using Merriam's examples, you can say:
'Ethics is his chosen field of study,' or you can say, 'The ethics of reuse and upcycling were imbued in the creation of all the pieces.' 'Is' in the first example is singular. 'Were' in the second example is plural. Both are correct. And that's the kind of help you can often find in a dictionary. Often, not always.
Merriam's entry for 'minority' doesn't have any helpful notes about whether it's singular or plural. I don't even see them give any examples in which 'minority' is the subject of a verb, so we can't draw a good inference from the dictionary's 'minority' entry.
I looked in my other reference books, too, including the usage guide Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage, which usually has the answers I'm looking for. But not this time. No entry for 'minority.'
Checking the issue online, as Richard did, seems like a reasonable approach. You can get some good information that way. You can also get a bucket of nonsense. And you can't know which is which.
Automatically generated AI Overview answers often prove AI isn't as 'I' as it thinks it is. I've seen it give a lot of stupid answers to all kinds of questions. Recently, it told me that a certain disease affects less than 1 in a million Americans, 'which is less than 1%.'
Gee, thanks, Google.
Searching for 'is it minority is or minority are' on the search engine, the first hit is their AI Overview, and the rest of the first page is filled with answers from message forums, where you can expect random users to be right almost as often as AI is.
But I knew from experience that there could be another way to tackle this problem. I have, in the past, written about whether 'majority' takes a singular or plural verb. I found the answer not in a dictionary but in a usage guide, Merriam Webster's Dictionary of English Usage, which says: 'Majority is a singular noun in frequent use as one of those collectives that take either a singular or plural verb depending on the writer's notion of the majority as a unit or as a collection of individuals.'
You can say 'the majority is unified on this issue' or 'the majority are fighting among themselves.' Depending on your meaning, either the singular or the plural interpretation can work.
Can we apply that logic to the word 'minority' and treat it as a singular or plural as we see fit? In the absence of a more knowledgeable source, I'll make the call. Yes, we can.
June Casagrande is the author of 'The Joy of Syntax: A Simple Guide to All the Grammar You Know You Should Know.' She can be reached at JuneTCN@aol.com.
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