I recently fielded questions about two subject-verb agreement errors that readers noticed in the media. One was heard on an NPR program. The other was committed by, um, a columnist who should have ...

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 ...

Subject-verb agreement means that your verb must be conjugated, or changed, to fit (or agree) with the subject. Subjects can be singular or plural. Think of singular and plural as mathematical ...

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; ...

Why is Christian Science in our name? Our name is about honesty. The Monitor is owned by The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and we’ve always been transparent about that. The church publishes the ...

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 ...

Is ‘majority’ singular or plural? The word “majority” can be either singular or plural, depending on whether we are talking about a group or collection of individuals or the individuals in a group. If ...