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Tuesday, January 27, 2009

Criminal Sentence 158: The Meaning of Subject-Verb Agreement

From a book I'm reading:

"The meaning of these words aren’t known."

From the look of things, the meaning of grammar aren't known either.

Take away the prepositional phrase and the criminal sentence reads like this:

"The meaning ... aren't known."

Oops: "ISN'T known."

The moral of this story is know your subject and then know your verb.

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