Petty Grammar
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Although Josh has removed his original article from his site, my response to them will remain here.
In the article entitled "Veterans of Truth" on his Voice of Reason website, Josh makes an astounding blunder in his analysis of the following VOT statement in red font:This group publishes only a scant few items. Their hymn book, entitled HYMNS OLD AND NEW, was published in 1951 and 1987. A "friends' list" giving name, address and phone number, is provided to a local area of friends. (Due to recent attempts to provide the friends with facts concerning their group, many friends' lists no longer contain addresses.)
Josh writes, "Being unable to resist the impulse to be petty, I direct the reader to note the grammatical error in the first sentence "a scant few items". The word scant has a similar meaning to the word few but they are not identical in meaning and thus neither word should be positioned side-by-side with the other. As a further note, the author seems to be alternating uncomfortably between second and third person indicatives in each new sentence (i.e. are, is, was).
For example, in the second sentence the author writes, "was published" yet in the third sentence writes, "giving name, address and phone number is provided". To make grammatical sense, the second line should read "are provided", but even with this adjustment, the whole piece of writing is grammatically scant.
[Clay] I must say that things really have gone from bad to worse when Josh feels moved to correct someone else's grammar. I suppose that by even addressing this I run the risk of being just as "petty" as Josh; however, I cannot let this go without comment. Unfortunately, Josh does not seem to have a firm grasp on the noun-verb relationship. The sentence in question is this one: A "friends' list" giving name, address and phone number, is provided to a local area of friends.
For some reason, Josh thinks the verb in this sentence should be "are" instead of "is". However, the subject of the sentence is "list", not the elliptical clause "giving name, address and phone number". The subject "list" is SINGULAR. There are not multiple lists - there is one friends' list; therefore, it requires a corresponding SINGULAR verb phrase, i.e., "is provided", not "are".
Just as in the second sentence the subject "hymn book" and the corresponding verb phrase "was published" is SINGULAR, the third sentence also contains singular subject and verb. They might be easier to understand in their simplified forms:
Second Sentence: "Hymn book...was published"
Third Sentence: "friends' list...is provided"
This is contrasted with the 4th sentence "Due to recent attempts to provide the friends with facts concerning their group, many friends' lists no longer contain addresses." Here the VOT author correctly matches up the plural noun "lists" with the corresponding verb form "contain". In other words, the plural form is "lists... contain"; the singular form would have been "list... contains". In the same way, the third sentence is "list...is provided" in singular form, whereas the plural form would have been "lists...are provided".
This is all so silly, but perhaps the lesson to be learned here is that if you're going to be petty by correcting someone's grammar, at least make sure that what you're saying is actually RIGHT!
Perhaps more energy will be devoted to discussing the issues from now on.........
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