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Tuesday, January 26, 2010

Criminal Sentence 331: I Don't Agree with You on That

Overheard on "Antiques Roadshow" about a necklace:

"The inspiration for the components of the piece come from the Moorish and the Spanish tradition."

Two boo-boos here:
1) The subject of the sentence is "inspiration." Forget about the two prepositional phrases that follow. Therefore, the verb should be singular: "comes."
2) The Moorish tradition and the Spanish tradition are two separate traditions, so the word "tradition" should be plural: "traditions."

I'll bet that if this sentence had been written and then reviewed later, these two errors might have been detected. It's harder to fix such boo-boos when you're speaking, so I suppose I can forgive the jewelry appraiser for speaking imprecisely.

P.S. The necklace was valued at around $6,000.

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