A flock of birds fly or a flock of birds flies?

Posted by June on May 12, 2025
LABELS: GRAMMAR, SUBJECT VERB AGREEMENT

Subject-verb agreement is usually pretty easy. But even the most grammar-savvy people can get confounded by sentences like these:

A team of rivals was/were meeting the statehouse.

A bunch of whiners is/are affecting morale.

A flock of birds fly/flies by every day.

Everyone knows that a team was meeting but rivals were meeting. Everyone knows that a bunch is affecting but whiners are affecting. And everyone knows that a flock flies but birds fly.

But when noun phrase contains a singular noun and a plural noun, things can get pretty confusing. How do you know which noun should govern the verb?

Actually, the answer is easier than most would guess. You just take your pick. It’s up to you.

When your subject is a noun phrase with more than one noun, like “a team of rivals,” either one can "do" something. That is, either noun can get a verb. So choosing the verb depends only on which one of the nouns most seems to you like the one performing the action of the verb.

If you think the focus is more on the individual rivals than the whole team, you can write “A team of rivals were.” If you think it's more about the team, you can write “A  team of rivals was.”

There really is no right or wrong way. And your own ear is by far your best guide.

However, I have a way of looking at these structures that may help.

Every noun phrase — a team of rivals, a bunch of whiners, a flock of birds — has a head noun. Now, recall that a prepositional phrase is a preposition like “of” plus its object, which is always a noun or pronoun.  The "of rivals" and "of whiners" are prepositional phrases within the larger noun phrase.

The job of a prepositional phrases is to *modify.* They act sort of like adjectives or adverbs, depending on where they’re placed and what they point to. In a team of rivals, a bunch of whiners, and ˆ, the “of” phrases are all modifying nouns (team, bunch, and ˆ). So they’re really functioning like adjectives of those nouns. That’s how we know that team, bunch, and flock are the head nouns in their respective noun phrases.

Now, there’s no rule that says that the head noun gets the verb. There’s no reason nouns in the prepositional phrases can’t be doing some action. But I give head nouns a little more authority. As a default, I figure the head noun should get first stab at governing the verb. Only if it sounds funny do I make the verb agree with the object of the preposition.

So how would I write our three example sentences? Let’s see …

a team of rivals were (I feel that the rivals here are more important than the team.)

a bunch of whiners are (Ditto. Whiners seem to rule this noun phrase.)

a flock of birds flies (Here, I think the emphasis is on the whole flock.)

But if you disagree, your opinion is as valid as mine.

Comma after a short introductory phrase

Posted by June on May 5, 2025
LABELS: GRAMMAR, PUNCTUATION

I got an e-mail from a reader named Mike who had a question about the sentence “Soon I will go to the office,” which I had used as an example in a piece I wrote. Mike wanted to know “Shouldn't there be a comma after soon?”

Sure. Or not. Whatever.

A comma after a short introductory word, phrase, or clause, I told him, is optional. So in "Soon I will go to the office," no comma is needed.

“On Tuesday I will go to the office.” “On Tuesday, I will go to the office.”

You could go either way on these. It depends solely on which way you, the writer, feel best conveys the way you want it to come across.

But the longer the introductory matter, the greater the likelihood a comma will help.

“On the third Tuesday of the month, I go to the office.”

Technically you could skip the comma in the sentence. But I wouldn’t.

“On the third Tuesday of every month that ends in the letter Y, I go to the office.”

In this one, by the time you get to the main clause (“I go”), you’re in so deep that it’s hard to remember a main clause is even coming. So in that case, I’m guess that about 99% of editors would agree a comma is needed.

It’s just one of many areas of the language in which good judgment reigns supreme.

What's the past tense of 'belie'?

Posted by June on April 28, 2025
LABELS: BELIE, BELIED, GRAMMAR, PAST TENSE OF BELIE

You probably don’t read a lot of books written in the 1820s. But if you did, you’d see the word “belie” a lot more. According to Google Ngram Viewer, in the early 1800s, “belie” appeared in books about four times as often as it does now.

Maybe that’s why I find the word a little intimidating. I never use it, partly because its definition is confusing, but mostly because its past tense is terrifying.

Today I belie, yesterday I belay? Belaid? Belied? And what about in its -ing form? Beling? Belieing? I never know. That’s ironic when you consider how well-versed I am in the past forms of “lie” and “lay.”  Today I lie, yesterday I lay, in the past I have lain. Today I lay the book on the table, yesterday I laid the book on the table, in the past I have laid the book on the table. I’ve written about “lie” and “lay” so many times I no longer have to look them up.

But for “belie” … well, better to just avoid the word altogether than to botch its past tense. At least, that’s how I’ve been operating. That changes today, starting with some good news for anyone who’s ever struggled to figure out the past form of a verb: Definite answers — not just opinions that amateurs post on the internet — are always handy.

Open any major dictionary, digital or physical, turn to any irregular verb, and the first thing you see after the entry word will tell you how to conjugate it in every form. For example, in Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary, after the entry for “begin,” you see in bold “began, begun, beginning.”

Dictionaries list the simple past tense, “began,” first, followed by the past participle, “begun.” The easiest way to understand past participles is to think of them as the forms that go with “have”: I have begun. For a lot of verbs, there’s no difference between the past participle and the regular past tense, which is why you say, “I laid the book on the table” and also “I have laid the book on the table.” In those cases, the dictionary lists only the one past form, “laid,” indicating that it serves as both.

For past forms of “belie,” Merriam-Webster’s lists only “belied.” So that’s the past tense, “Her gentleness belied her strength,” and the past participle, “Her gentleness has belied her strength.” Not as difficult as I feared. The progressive participle, “belying,” seems pretty easy now that I realize the obvious: that “belie” is more closely related to the “lie” that means to deceive than to the “lie” that means to recline. And we all know how to conjugate that type of lying: Today I lie, yesterday I lied, in the past I have lied, I am lying. “Belie” mirrors that.

The definition of “belie,” though, is another matter. It’s confusing.

The main definition is to give a false impression of something, as in Merriam’s example “Her gentleness belies her strength.” But the secondary definition is “to show something to be false or wrong,” as in, “The evidence belies their claims of innocence.”

In other words, it can mean to conceal a truth or to reveal a truth.

Some experts disavow this second definition. “The word does not mean ‘to disclose or reveal,’ as is sometimes thought,” writes Garner’s Modern American Usage. “That is, some writers wrongly think of it in a sense almost antithetical to sense 1.”

It’s always unfortunate when a word has a secondary definition that contradicts its main definition. (Read the full dictionary entry for the word “literally” and you’ll see what I mean.) So even though “belie” is easy to put in the past tense, I’ll continue not using it in any tense.

Confusing hyphenation situations

Posted by June on April 21, 2025
LABELS: COMPOUND MODIFIER, GRAMMAR, hyphens

Most of the time, hyphens connect two words that work together to describe a noun, as in “heat-seeking missile.” The hyphen makes clear it’s not a heat missile. It’s not a seeking missile. Neither of those words can describe missile on its own. They have to work together, to connect, to tell you about the missile.

These are called compound modifiers: words that team up to work like a modifier, usually an adjective, to describe another word. These modifiers are central to hyphenation rules, which say, basically: Hyphenate a compound modifier when doing so can prevent ambiguity. That is, don’t let your reader confuse “buffalo-riding birds” with “buffalo riding birds.”

Compound modifiers can be adverbs, too. Often, these compound adverbs come after the verb: She works part-time. And because adverbs can modify adjectives, as in “fabulously wealthy,” compound adverbs do the same: “jaw-droppingly wealthy.”

Nouns like “mock-up,” and verbs like “mass-produce” can also be hyphenated. But a lot of those are in the dictionary, meaning you don’t have to figure out on your own how to write them. Then there are prefixes and suffixes, whose hyphenation rules are a mess, widely disagreed upon and inconsistent, requiring a hyphen in “re-create” but none in “reenact.”

“Use of the hyphen is far from standardized,” the Associated Press Stylebook writes. “It can be a matter of taste, judgment and style sense. Think of hyphens as an aid to readers’ comprehension. If a hyphen makes the meaning clearer, use it. If it just adds clutter and distraction to the sentence, don’t use it.”

AP’s explanations, exceptions, special circumstances and examples go on for about 900 words, making hyphens one of the longest entries in the style guide. I had referred back to these 900ish words countless times in the years leading up to that fateful day I learned about that dry old meat. Yet I was stopped in my tracks. Was it 30-day-dry-aged beef or 30-day dry-aged beef? That is, were all those words working as a single adjective to modify “beef”?

 “At times, a writer must decide whether words preceding a noun form a single adjective that should be hyphenated as one modifier or whether some terms within are functioning independently,” I wrote in my 2010 book “The Best Punctuation Book, Period.” “For example, in choosing between ‘a discriminating-but-value-conscious shopper’ and ‘a discriminating but value-conscious shopper,’ the writer can decide based on whichever best captures the intended meaning.” Then I shared the results of a survey I gave to some professional copy editors, who all agreed that value-conscious should be hyphenated but the rest should not. Yet when I asked them about “30-day-dry-aged,” they disagreed. Two thirds said to hyphenate the whole shebang as a single compound. The remainder said it’s “30-day dry-aged.”
 

There’s no wrong answer, but I’m with the majority on this one. It’s not 30-day beef that is dry-aged. All four words in that compound build on each other to create a single meaning.

Most often, these “compounds of uncertain scope” appear in phrases like “extreme-heat-related illness.” This came up recently in my copy editing work with just one hyphen. I chose logic over looks. It’s not an extreme illness that’s heat-related. It’s the heat, not the illness, that’s extreme. 

Hyphens have fallen somewhat out of fashion, so longer compounds are getting rarer. But I’ll keep hyphenating 30-day-dry-aged beef and extreme-heat-related illness as long as the rules allow.