NGM Blog Central - King Herod’s Curse - National Geographic Magazine

We receive a lot of feedback—both positive and negative—from readers all over the world each month. Last December’s article “King Herod Revealed,” in particular, provoked a flurry of emails, mostly from readers objecting to the claim: “Herod is best known for slaughtering every male infant in Bethlehem in an attempt to kill Jesus. He is almost certainly innocent of this crime.” (See the Letters section in the April issue for a sampling of letters and a clarification.)

Recently I received another email about the Herod article, but with an altogether different criticism. A self-described “avid reader of National Geographic for 30 years and a professor of English” who uses the magazine “for discourse analysis and style” wrote from Argentina with a grammatical question, adding, “Please clarify this before my students find it.” Her query was whether the subject-verb agreement in the following sentences is correct:

“The condition of the sarcophagi fragments confirm…”

“The condition of the sarcophagi confirm…”

Chalk one up for the professor. It’s the condition that confirms, not the fragments or the sarcophagi that confirm. The errors are obvious once someone points them out, but the mistakes are also easy to read right over. We were misled by the plural fragments and sarcophagi. (Sometimes the last noun in the phrase is the governing subject, and a plural verb is acceptable, such as in “an epidemic of productions that reject…” This is known as agreement by proximity.)

As much as I would like to pin the blame on Herod—call it King Herod’s Curse—I take full responsibility. It was a small massacre of the English language, but fortunately—as Lesley Rogers pointed out to me—no one was actually hurt.

—David Brindley

Posted by David Brindley | Comments (0)
Filed Under: Grammar, Rogers' Rules of Order

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