Wednesday, May 13, 2015

My Apologies, Dear Readers, for Subject-Verb Agreement Errors

Me Blushing

My apologies, dear readers, for the subject-verb agreement errors in my posting yesterday. I do know that "Supremes" is a plural noun and demands a plural verb to follow it. Because nothing annoys me so much as a subject-verb agreement error (well, there's the misuse of the transitive verb "lay" for the intransitive verb "lie," which is now becoming normative, though, as Ms. Ida Cook dinned into my ears in 9th grade, hens lay and people lie; and there's the use of simple past forms of verbs for their past participle ["I've drank it all"]), I was mortified when I re-read yesterday's posting and saw, glaring out at me, not one but two verb errors following the subject "Supremes."


Since I don't talk this way, I wonder how it's possible for me to write this way — as if I've never sat in a classroom before? My mother would be mortified. Her mother before her would be mortified, when one of the first lessons she ever gave me in my tender young life was to sit me on her lap and patiently explain that only little country boys would say, "That bee stanged me."

To which I replied that I was a country boy.

And maybe have thus remained.

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