Saw this as a sample sentence for nootropic over at Dictionary.com, where I've seen grammatically dodgy sample sentences before:
The effectiveness, and safety, of certain nootropics remain debatable.
What's the error, and why is it erroneous? Put your answer in the comments... if you dare.
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- The effectiveness and safety of certain nootropics remains debatable.
ReplyDelete- Yes especially, the ones you, cook up in the actual, tropics;
Well, I'm a little rusty on my grammatical terminology, but basically I believe the commas shouldn't be there. The commas unnecessarily split up the subject of the sentence, which should be "The effectiveness and safety of certain nootropics...." The verb in the predicate, though, is correct as the subject is plural.
ReplyDeleteThe layman's way I learned about the use of commas was that if you have a phrase set off by commas, you should be able to drop it from the sentence without changing the underlying structure. "...and safety" isn't a phrase, though, and can't be handled this way. Maybe they were going for something like: "The effectiveness, not to mention the safety, of certain nootropics...."
But that's just gut feeling. I will wait for you to enlighten us on the precise error here.
Charles,
ReplyDeleteYes: if you remove the commas, "and safety" is no longer a parenthetical expression. Now, you've got a compound subject, which is treated as plural. As you say, then, the verb as written is correct:
A and B remain debatable.
There is an argument to be made that certain compound subjects take the singular if, when together, they form a single concept.
Peace and quiet appeals to me, Lieutenant.
—Uhura, "Star Trek III" (RIP, Nichelle)
The notion of "peace and quiet" is a singular concept in most English-speakers' minds, so you can get away with the third-person singular appeals. Uhura is basically saying, "The idea of peace and quiet appeals to me."
I think, though, that it's harder to argue that point with "effectiveness and safety." These aren't two concepts that we routinely hear put together, so it's not like "peace and quiet" or "hearth and home."
So the other way to correct the sentence is simply to keep the commas (and thus the parenthetical) and to add an "s" to remain.
The effectiveness, and safety, of certain nootropics remains debatable.
Parentheticals don't figure into subject-verb agreement. Some will say that this looks awkward, but that's because they don't understand how parentheticals work.
Josh, as well as his brothers, is a banjo player.
You can safely ignore parentheticals when reckoning SVA.
The "parentheticalization" of "and safety" still kind of bugs me, though. Is that just me? I kind of hate it when people set off "and something" with commas. If you really want to set it off like that, you must have a good reason for doing so, so make that reason explicit with something like "not to mention" or "let alone." But I'm probably being too picky here.
ReplyDelete