A Word, Please: The herd rushes to offer wrong answers to a decent grammar question

There are no stupid questions, only stupid answers. Whoever first said that did me a huge favor, considering how many times I’ve openly flaunted my ignorance rather than remain stuck in it.

And nowhere is this truer than in the realm of grammar. People with questions feel stupid for not already knowing the answer, but the people who answer them are often the ones who should have stayed mum.

Google searches for “dumb grammar question” and “stupid grammar question” prove the point. Here’s one of the first hits, a 2017 post in a writers’ community message board. “DUMB grammar question!” someone named Sherry began. “After being a writer for almost 40 years, I am aware this is a really silly question. I should know better. BUT … which is correct? ‘My family HAS seen me through’ … or ‘My family HAVE seen me through.’”

Raise your hand if you were taught in school that certain collective nouns can take either a singular or plural verb, depending on your meaning. Yeah, me neither. But that’s the case here. “Family” is usually singular, taking a singular verb like “has.” But sometimes it’s meant as a collective of individuals acting independently of each other: “Half my family are voting for candidate 1 and the other half are voting for candidate 2.” Another example: My family comes to the reunion every year, but my family come from all over the U.S.

In Sherry’s question, though, the singular interpretation, while not mandatory, is better: My family has seen me through. But that’s not the answer she got.

One person said Sherry’s real problem was passive voice and that she should make it active voice by changing “My family has seen me through” to “My family saw me through.”

Um, no. Both those sentences are in active voice. They’re just different verb tenses. “Has seen” is called the present perfect tense. “Saw” is the simple past tense.

Passive would be “I have been seen through by my family,” with the object of the action made into the subject of the sentence. But in both “My family saw” and “My family has seen,” the doer of the action, the family, is the subject.

Opinion

A Word, Please: The torturous difference between ‘rack’ and ‘wrack’

Though their meanings have almost come to meet, “wrack” and “rack” are two different words with one’s origins in the sea and the other in torture.

Oct. 8, 2024

Other posters tried to answer Sherry’s question by making up examples using “herd of cows.” “The herd of cows were chewing cud,” one poster wrote, concluding “herd was … cows were.”

This is exceptionally unhelpful. Sherry had asked whether a single word, “family,” took a singular or plural verb. But “herd of cows” is a more complicated noun phrase that contains both a singular and a plural. And it raises a far more complicated question: When you have a singular noun modified by a prepositional phrase like “of cows,” which one governs the verb: “a herd of cows is” or “a herd of cows are”?

In most cases, it’s up to the speaker. If you’re talking about the herd as a single unit, “The herd of cows is out to pasture,” it takes a singular verb. If you’re putting the emphasis on the cows acting not as a group but independently, you might prefer the plural verb: The herd of cows are crowding each other out.

Also at play in this sentence is the grammatical concept of attraction. It can sound weird to have a singular verb like “is” immediately after a plural noun like “cows”: cows is. So that strengthens the case for making the verb agree with the last word in the noun phrase.

A few told Sherry that “family” is singular. End of story. Also not exactly correct, since it’s usually but not always singular. But at least she can work with that.

Of course, some posters couldn’t resist the urge to tell Sherry to recast the sentence, for example, by saying “My family members have seen me through.”

Sherry’s been writing for 40 years. She knows she can change a sentence if she wants to. That’s not what she asked. She asked a smart question, but the answers she got … well, you know.

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 [email protected].