Verb-Noun Agreement, Part I

No one likes to see nouns and verbs fight. It’s ugly and unsettling. So what do we mean by “agreement”?

Singles with Singles, Plurals with Plurals
A plural noun (or pronoun) takes the plural form of the verb. Singular nouns go with singular verb forms. This is news to no one.

Lucy and Edmund enter the Narnian wood before their siblings.
Unfortunately, Edmund meets the White Witch, while Lucy meets a nice faun.

Here’s the Tricky Part

The only trick to verb-noun agreement comes with a few select cases that people tend to confuse. Here’s one:

(RIGHT)
Peter is one of those people who know how to take charge.

Some would look at that sentence and think it should look like this:

(WRONG)
Peter is one of those people who knows how to take charge.

It looks right because of that pesky word one. Shouldn’t one be followed by a singular verb? No. Let’s break it down:

Peter [singular noun] + is [singular verb] one [singular noun] of those people...

If we stop there, everything agrees—Peter is singular, and so is his verb and the appositive (the thing we’re saying that he is). We wouldn’t say Peter is those people, right? But the clause continues:

... people who knows how to take charge.

There’s the problem. The clause who knows how to take charge modifies people, not one. So it has to be:

(RIGHT)
Peter is one of those people who know how to take charge.

But!

Peter is one who knows how to take charge.

In the first example, we lumped Peter into a group—those people who know how to take charge. But here, we’re only talking about Peter. And in this case, who knows how to take charge modifies the word one—because you don’t have a pesky “of those people” clause to muck it all up. You might just as easily say Peter is one guy who knows how to take charge, or Peter is a fellow who knows how to take charge.
One More Sticky Point

Hold your breath, because this is also correct:

Peter is the only one of us who knows how to take charge.

Huh? Why?

Think about your clause. Is this a proper phrase?

[blah blah blah] ... us who knows how to take charge.

No. Us isn’t a subject pronoun. In fact, of us is just a prepositional phrase thrown in to let you know we're not talking about them or you, but us. You can’t turn this sentence around and begin it with this clause the way you might with our first example:

Of the people who know how to take charge, Peter is certainly one.

(This is a horrible sentence, I know, but I’m making a point here.)

If you tried that with Example #3, it would go:

Of us who knows how to take charge, Peter is the only one.

This is not only a bad sentence, it’s ungrammatical. Us can’t be used as a subject.

If you thought this was fun, hold on to your hat! More about agreement tomorrow.