Q. Is the following sentence correct? “Do the speaker or the characters have any specific personality traits that are highlighted throughout the poem?” According to CMOS 5.143, “When a verb has two or more subjects connected by or or nor, the verb agrees with the last-named subject” (e.g., “Bob or his friends have your key”; “neither the twins nor Jon is prepared to leave”). Based on that, it seems like it would be correct. “Characters” is closest to the verb, so that part is correct. I’m wondering if the auxiliary verb should match the verb or the subject closest to it? “Do the speaker or the characters have . . .” “Does the speaker or the characters have . . .” I’m probably overthinking this, but I can’t find any definitive answers when it comes to questions with compound subjects—one singular and one plural—joined by “or.” Could you point me to a rule that might address this? Thank you for your help.
A. We haven’t been able to find anything definitive either. So let’s try to invent something—we can call it the inverted-proximity rule—by adding on to the current wording in CMOS 5.143 (the new part is underlined):
When a verb has two or more subjects connected by or or nor, the verb agrees with the last-named subject; however, in a question that begins with an auxiliary verb, the auxiliary usually agrees with the first-named subject.
Here’s what that would look like relative to your example, starting with each subject used alone (and shortening your original predicate to make the examples easier to digest):
Does the speaker have any faults?
Do the characters have any faults?
Does the speaker or the characters have any faults?
That last example, where the auxiliary “Does” agrees with the subject “speaker,” seems to work well enough. But so does “Do the speaker or the characters have . . .” The problem with any rule based on a subject’s proximity to the verb is that a singular and a plural subject joined by or will tend to read as plural regardless of the order of subjects.
The remedy for questions, when you don’t like the result, is to put the plural subject first: “Do the characters or the speaker have any faults?” That fix can work for statements also: “Either Bob or his friends have your key” seems to work slightly better than “Either Bob’s friends or Bob has your key.”
In sum, for a plural and a singular subject joined by or (or nor), apply the proximity rule as stated above; if the result seems awkward, try switching the order of subjects.
[This answer relies on the 18th edition of CMOS (2024) unless otherwise noted.]
Q. “Neither I/me nor my dog responded.” Should it be “me” or “I”?
A. The correct form of pronoun in sentences like yours can usually be figured out by considering the pronoun separately from the noun that it’s paired with. In your sentence, that process would look like this:
I/me didn’t respond.
plus
My dog didn’t respond.
equals
Neither I/me nor my dog responded.
If your goal is to use Standard English, the correct form would be “I didn’t respond,” which answers your question: “Neither I nor my dog responded.” See also CMOS 5.44; for more on Standard English, see 5.4.
[This answer relies on the 18th edition of CMOS (2024) unless otherwise noted.]
Q. MS Word doesn’t like the “of” in this sentence: “All of these valves are on separate channels.” It puts a blue dotted line under “All of” and wants to get rid of the word “of” even though “of” starts a prepositional phrase. Is this some new trend? I know I could reword the sentence to read “These valves are all on separate channels,” but that seems to be a lot of work for what used to be (what I thought was) normal.
A. According to Bryan Garner, all the has been more common than all of the “since the beginnings of Modern English,” a pattern that holds when a word like its—or these in your example—is substituted for the. A Google Books Ngram comparing the frequency of the phrases all the things and all these things with and without of in published sources since 1800 backs this up. Substitute valves for things and the of-less versions are still in the lead. So it’s not a new trend. For whatever reason, the preposition of has long been considered optional or unnecessary in sentences like yours.
Still, as Garner notes, there are some exceptions, including when all is followed by a pronoun that isn’t either demonstrative or possessive, as in all of it (not all it). See Garner’s Modern English Usage (5th ed., Oxford, 2022), under “all. A. All (of).”
OK, but—exceptions aside—should you change all of to all “whenever possible,” as Garner suggests and Word supports? Yes, if you’re looking to cut unnecessary words, as editors usually are. But the phrase all of is just as correct as some of, many of, and most of—grammatically similar phrases that all require of where it might be optional after all.
So if you happen to think that all of works better than all in any given sentence, simply ignore the dotted blue underline, which is triggered by one of Word’s checks for “conciseness.” Most editors understand the value of being concise, but we also want things to sound natural.
Tip: In the desktop version of Word for Windows, the conciseness checks are listed in the Grammar Settings dialog box, which you’ll find by going to File > Options > Proofing, under Writing Style > Grammar & Refinements > Settings. If the box next to Wordiness (under the options for Conciseness) is checked, that’s what’s causing Word to flag all of. (Settings in Word for Mac will be similar.)
[This answer relies on the 18th edition of CMOS (2024) unless otherwise noted.]
Q. Does CMOS prefer the use of “persons” or “people” when describing a collection of human beings, such as you might find at a grocery store?
A. More than one person at a grocery store would normally be referred to as people, not persons. According to Garner’s Modern English Usage, the traditional distinction between persons for smaller numbers (especially of specific people) and people for larger numbers (especially of people considered more generally) has fallen out of style in favor of people in most contexts (5th ed. [Oxford, 2022], under “people. A. And persons”).
So one might have once referred to the people at the grocery store but the two persons ahead of me in line. Today, people is usually considered to be the more natural choice for both and can be used just about anywhere the plural is called for.
[This answer relies on the 18th edition of CMOS (2024) unless otherwise noted.]
Q. Which is correct: “one should do one’s duty” or “one should do his or her duty”—or, using singular they, “one should do their duty”?
A. In your example, one is closer to the personal pronoun you than to the indefinite pronoun everyone. Everyone would normally pair with his, her, or singular their, as in everyone should do their duty (see also CMOS 5.51). One, by contrast, can simply switch to the possessive case like other such pronouns:
I should do my duty; you should do your duty; he should do his duty; she should do her duty; they should do their duty; we should do our duty; one should do one’s duty
According to Bryan Garner, however, writers have tended to pair one with he (and, by extension, one with his), despite objections from “strict grammarians” and others (see Garner’s Modern English Usage, 5th ed. [Oxford, 2022], under “One . . . he”).
We can only hope, then, that we’re doing our duty as arbiters of style by recommending a pairing of one with one’s.
[This answer relies on the 18th edition of CMOS (2024) unless otherwise noted.]
Q. Hi CMOS, I have a (possibly silly) question. Would the phrase “dogs have a tail” be considered grammatically correct? My instinct is that it should be “dogs have tails,” with both nouns plural. On the other hand, there are some contexts where “dogs have a tail” sounds fine, at least to my ear. For example, if someone asked you what the difference is between dogs and frogs, you might say, “for one thing, dogs have a tail.” Is this a quirk of spoken English vs. written English? This is a trivial example, but this issue comes up a lot in the scientific writing I edit. If it’s purely a personal style choice, I’d prefer to stick with the authors’ original wording. Wordings? Thanks!
A. Though some dogs can be silly, your question isn’t silly at all. One problem is that either statement—dogs have a tail and dogs have tails—could be ambiguous if taken literally. The first could mean that dogs as a group share one tail, and the second could mean that dogs each have more than one tail.
But it’s common knowledge that the animal known as a dog normally has only one tail, so you can follow your instincts (which are correct in this case, grammatically speaking) and match plural subject with plural object: dogs have tails. Use a singular object only when the plural might be misunderstood (unlikely with dogs and tails), or when the fact that the object is singular is the point—as in most dogs have only one tail.
This advice applies equally to writing and speaking, but you’re probably right to suggest that a singular object would be more common in speech than in edited prose. For more on this type of construction, known as the distributive possessive, see CMOS 5.25.
[This answer relies on the 18th edition of CMOS (2024) unless otherwise noted.]
Q. Which is preferred, (n + 1)st or (n + 1)th?
A. An argument can be made for either, and they are both relatively common, as this extensive thread at Stack Exchange’s English Language & Usage forum suggests. If you need a source to back up one choice or the other, a user named Mitch found one: Handbook of Writing for the Mathematical Sciences, by Nicholas J. Higham (2nd ed., Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, 1998).
Higham’s book says that the ordinal suffix depends on the number rather than on the variable—as in (k + 1)st, (k + 2)nd, (k + 3)rd, (k + 4)th, and so on (see section 5.5, p. 63). Any variable alone would use th (kth), because k is equivalent to (k + 0), and the ordinal for zero is zeroth.
As that same Stack Exchange thread points out, some sources use a hyphen before the ordinal ending: (k + 1)-st. The thread also suggests that a preference for th treats k + 1 as a variation on kth, whereas st favors pronunciation (as in “kay plus first”).
Or see the Encyclopedia of Mathematics (European Mathematical Society, 2002), available online at https://encyclopediaofmath.org/. Usage there varies, from (n + 1)th (under “Markov braid theorem”) and (n − 1)-th (“Fredholm equation”) to (n + 1)st (“Zipf law”) and (n − 1)-st (“Weyl method”). (Other variables, including k, follow a similar pattern.) But the st variations (with or without a hyphen) seem to be more common than the ones with th, lending support to Higham’s recommendation.
Verdict? (n + 1)st, barring a strong author or publisher preference for th.
[This answer relies on the 18th edition of CMOS (2024) unless otherwise noted.]
Q. Should the indefinite article “a” be used when introducing a professor emeritus? For example, “He is [a] professor emeritus of chemistry at the university.” On the one hand, “a” usually indicates that the person is not the only person with that title at the university. On the other hand, Google Ngram shows a higher preference for no article.
A. We agree that adding “a” could make sense if there’s more than one such professor at the university in question. But whether there’s one or eleven, omitting the article makes “professor emeritus” sound more like a professional title than a job description. That is, it sounds fancier.
This may explain why it would be relatively rare to refer to someone as “teacher of” chemistry or another subject (without “a”), whereas calling someone “professor of”—even without “emeritus”—is fairly common (“She is professor of chemistry at . . .”). The word professor enjoys a status that teacher does not.
In other words, there’s no definitive answer to your question. Though adding an “a” or an “an” can work well before a title held by more than one person, omitting the article before “professor” and variations of that term even when there’s more than one can be an equally good choice, one that follows an unstated convention in academia.
[This answer relies on the 18th edition of CMOS (2024) unless otherwise noted.]
Q. I have scoured the internet looking for an answer: How are plurale tantum [plural only] words like “pants,” “scissors,” “sunglasses,” and “manners” constructed using the suffix “-less”? Would it be “pantless” or “pantsless,” “scissorless” or “scissorsless,” and so on? I can find arguments for either construction for each term. I’m hoping there’s a grammar rule (somewhere) that will guide me toward a definitive answer. If the “s” is retained before the suffix, most words become awkward to say the least (“trousersless,” “slacksless,” “shearsless,” etc.). Is it simply arbitrary? Based on popular usage? Something else?
A. We can’t cite a rule, but we know that the suffix “-less” almost always gets added to the singular form of a noun. And we could guess that this fact would influence how “-less” might be added to a word like “pants.”
In other words, if “shoeless” (no shoes), “witless” (no wits), “childless” (no children), and “toothless” (no teeth) are all standard, then “pantless” (no pants) would seem like a reasonable option. And that’s what the OED has (“pantless,” not “pantsless”).
But compared with the standard singular forms “shoe,” “wit,” and so on, “pant” as a singular noun is kind of rare. You might consider ignoring the OED in this case and going with “pantsless” instead.
Some of the other words you mention may work better without the “s.” “Scissorless” and “trouserless” seem OK, maybe because the adjectives of those words are commonly spelled without an “s,” as in scissor kick* and trouser pocket (the adjective form of “pants” more often retains the “s”: pants pocket). And “mannerless” is in Merriam-Webster and the OED.
“Sunglassless” and “sunglassesless,” however, both look like mistakes, and “slack(s)less” and “shear(s)less” also have problems (starting with the fact that slack and shear have multiple meanings). Rewriting would be best (e.g., without sunglasses, slacks, or shears). Or try a hyphen (e.g., “sunglasses-less”).
In sum, approach these terms on a case-by-case basis, and don’t settle for an awkward or ambiguous result.
* Merriam-Webster records only “scissors kick” (as of October 2024), but that spelling has become less common than “scissor kick” in published books in recent years, as this n-gram from Google suggests.
[This answer relies on the 18th edition of CMOS (2024) unless otherwise noted.]
Q. Several years ago, radio station WBUR in Boston began crediting its listeners with the words “brought to you by the listeners OF WBUR.” I have found it most disturbing and would appreciate it if CMOS were to dive into this controversy. Longman Dictionary of Phrasal Verbs does not address this since the example is of a noun form of a verb. Thank you.
A. Whereas it’s true that we listen to something, never of, that doesn’t mean we can’t be listeners of whatever it is we’re listening to. The form “listeners to” might even be an example of hypercorrection—that is, a pairing of “to” with “listeners” may stem from a mistaken idea that a noun must be used in the same way as any corresponding verb. The phrase “listeners of WBUR” simply means “WBUR’s listeners” (see CMOS 5.23).
That said, both pairings are common (as this n-gram from Google Books suggests), and we’d be inclined to accept either one. In WBUR’s defense, however, that of in the example you quote is arguably the better choice; “brought to you by the listeners to WBUR” might be misheard, however fleetingly, as meaning that listeners are bringing something to WBUR. They are, but that’s not the intended meaning of those words.
[This answer relies on the 18th edition of CMOS (2024) unless otherwise noted.]