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Los Angeles Times
17-07-2025
- General
- Los Angeles Times
A Word, Please: Singular vs. plural? That's the question
A friend emailed recently to ask about the grammar on a T-shirt that read: 'The only minority destroying the country are the billionaires.' 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@
Los Angeles Times
04-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Casagrande: ‘Anemone' just one linguistic gaslighting word that falls under the term ‘metathesis'
In the Netflix series 'Umbrella Academy,' Aidan Gallagher plays Number Five, a 58-year-old assassin and theoretical physicist trapped in a 13-year-old's body. A naturally brainy teen and gifted actor, Gallagher has no trouble convincing me Five is a late-middle-aged genius unlocking the mysteries of space-time to stop a world-ending apocalypse. In his performance, I believe every word — well, every word but one: nuclear. Five pronounces it 'nucular.' I know a lot of people share my feelings on this: There's no vowel between the C and the L — no U to make the second syllable sound like 'cue.' The spelling makes clear that the second syllable should be 'clee.' Regular readers of this column know that language is seldom that simple. Just because one pronunciation is right doesn't mean another is wrong. 'Though disapproved of by many, pronunciations ending in (cue-lar) have been found in widespread use among educated speakers including scientists, lawyers, professors, congressmen, U.S. cabinet members, and at least two U.S. presidents and one vice president,' Merriam-Webster's dictionary notes. 'While most common in the U.S., these pronunciations have also been heard from British and Canadian speakers.' If you're like me, you might find this rationale frustrating. That is, when you say, 'It's annoying that so many people pronounce it that way,'' the experts reply, 'Many people pronounce it that way.' To which you reply, 'I know. I just said that. That's the problem.' For this reason, linguists can seem at times like they're gaslighting. But in fact, they're just leaving out one crucial bit of information: In language, 'many people do it' is the law of the land. Every word, every pronunciation and every rule of grammar was born of how people use the language. If enough of us started using 'shoobeedoobee' to mean 'rest assured that we'll handle your funeral arrangements with the utmost dignity,' eventually it would mean exactly that. Besides, for a recent column, I was happy to discover that my two-syllable pronunciation of 'caramel' is fine and possibly superior. So I'd be hypocritical to insist on a phonetic pronunciation of 'nuclear.' If there's a silver lining, for me, it's that 20-odd years into writing about grammar, I learned a new term to describe this type of sound switch around: metathesis. In linguistics, 'metathesis' means 'the process whereby a sound hops out of its proper place, so to speak, and pops up elsewhere in the word, or switches places with another sound in the word,' according to Merriam Webster's Dictionary of English Usage. Wikipedia gives examples that may strike a nerve. My favorite, straight from the sea: anenome in place of anemone. This one drives me nuts — not because people who use it wrong annoy me, but because years ago I declared myself incapable of ever using it right. Can't spell it. Can't pronounce it. I'll sign any petition that banishes it from the English language. Then there's 'cavalry' for 'calvary.' This one's more serious. If you get 'anemone' wrong, the worst that can happen is people will think you're doing a musical number from Sesame Street. But if you get cavalry wrong, you change your meaning. Merriam-Webster's definition of calvary is 'an open-air representation of the crucifixion of Jesus' or 'an experience of usually intense mental suffering.' A cavalry is a component of an army, especially one on horseback. 'Jewlery' in place of 'jewelry' is another common metathesis. I doubt I've ever pronounced this word the way it's spelled and don't plan to start anytime soon. 'Asteriks' for 'asterisk,' 'aks' for 'ask,' and 'iorn' for 'iron' are just a few more examples of common metatheses, and they all come with varying degrees of controversy. You can pick your likes and dislikes. Me, I'm soft on almost all these, except the incorrect pronunciation of 'nuclear' and any pronunciation, right or wrong, of 'anemone.' — 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@
