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Discussion Groups / English Usage / January 2004Usage of singular / plural
Hi, what is right: "This email and any attachment is confidental" or: "This email and any attachment are confidental"? Thanks Norbert "Norbert H. Kunth" <norbert.kunth@rzleipzig.de> wrote... > Hi, > > what is right: > "This email and any attachment is confidental" or: > "This email and any attachment are confidental"? "is". The sense is "This e-mail, together with any attachment, is confidential." Matti > "Norbert H. Kunth" <norbert.kunth@rzleipzig.de> wrote... > > Hi, [quoted text clipped - 5 lines] > "is". The sense is "This e-mail, together with any attachment, is > confidential." "Are". "R F" <rfontana@alumni.wesleyan.edu> wrote... > > "Norbert H. Kunth" <norbert.kunth@rzleipzig.de> wrote... > > > Hi, [quoted text clipped - 7 lines] > > "Are". I've just googled this, and your suggestion certainly has its supporters. It may even become supportable within fifty years. Matti > "Norbert H. Kunth" wrote... >> what is right: >> "This email and any attachment is confidental" or: >> "This email and any attachment are confidental"? > > "is". The sense is "This e-mail, together with any attachment, is > confidential." Oy! The sense is "This and that are confidential." None of that "together" stuff was mentioned. By the way, the usual expression would use "attachments" to allow for more than one of the "any".  SignatureSkitt (in Hayward, California) www.geocities.com/opus731/ Norbert wrote: >what is right: >"This email and any attachment is confidental" or: >"This email and any attachment are confidental"? The second version. "This house and any attached property are included in the lease." "This girl and any unattached boy are welcome at the dance." You get the idea. "J. W. Love" <lovejw@aol.comma.net> wrote... > Norbert wrote: > [quoted text clipped - 5 lines] > in the lease." "This girl and any unattached boy are welcome at the > dance." You get the idea. When the "and" implies an *extension* to the preceding item, the singular verb is usually used. Your second example doesn't follow this pattern, which is why the plural verb seems right as you've written it. Your first example is less clear-cut, and I think I would have used the singular verb for it. Matti > "J. W. Love" <lovejw@aol.comma.net> wrote... > > Norbert wrote: [quoted text clipped - 9 lines] > When the "and" implies an *extension* to the preceding item, the > singular verb is usually used. So something like This girl and her brothers is welcome at the dance. or This girl and any boy she brings is welcome at the dance. ? The latter would seem to be a strict parallel. For me, to get a singular reading, I'd have to make the conjunction a parenthetical This email, and any attachment, is confidential. This email (and any attachment) is confidential. This email--and any attachment--is confidential. Even there, I'm not confident whether my reflex would be "is" or "are". SignatureEvan Kirshenbaum +------------------------------------ HP Laboratories |If to "man" a phone implies handing 1501 Page Mill Road, 1U, MS 1141 |it over to a person of the male Palo Alto, CA 94304 |gender, then to "monitor" it |suggests handing it over to a kirshenbaum@hpl.hp.com |lizard. (650)857-7572 | Rohan Oberoi http://www.kirshenbaum.net/ "Evan Kirshenbaum" <kirshenbaum@hpl.hp.com> wrote... > > "J. W. Love" <lovejw@aol.comma.net> wrote... > > > Norbert wrote: [quoted text clipped - 19 lines] > > ? The latter would seem to be a strict parallel. I think the greater length of the phrase following the 'and', and in particular the inclusion of a verb in it, tends to make the plural more attractive. Perhaps a truer parallel would be "This girl and any gooseberry is welcome at the dance", to reference a recent thread. > For me, to get a > singular reading, I'd have to make the conjunction a parenthetical [quoted text clipped - 5 lines] > Even there, I'm not confident whether my reflex would be "is" or > "are". We have to disagree, then, because I'd have absolutely no hesitation in using the singular for each of those three. As I mentioned, Google evidence seems to agree with me, fwiw. Perhaps there's a whiff of the Pond about it, although the googling didn't seem to support that theory. Matti Evan wrote: >For me, to get a singular reading, I'd have to make the >conjunction a parenthetical [quoted text clipped - 5 lines] >Even there, I'm not confident whether my reflex would be >"is" or "are". I hear those examples as requiring a plural verb: to my ear, those parenthesizers---commas, parentheses, dashes---do nothing but dramatize the predicament, which remains fundamentally A + B. "J. W. Love" <lovejw@aol.comma.net> wrote... > Evan wrote: > [quoted text clipped - 11 lines] > parenthesizers---commas, parentheses, dashes---do nothing but > dramatize the predicament, which remains fundamentally A + B. This is quite interesting. Does anyone else agree with me? As I've said, googling evidence appears predominantly on my side, but so far I have absolutely no supporters here. Matti > "J. W. Love" <lovejw@aol.comma.net> wrote... > > Evan wrote: [quoted text clipped - 16 lines] > said, googling evidence appears predominantly on my side, but so far I > have absolutely no supporters here. Well, I see the problem as being that "any" suggests "possibly none." So if there is no attachment, it can hardly be "are." But you don't know which way it is. So "are" covers more cases -- one attachment, two attachments... Still, I hate this sort of question. Would you say "My daughter and possibly my son are going skiing" or "is going skiing"? I'd say "are." SignatureBest -- Donna Richoux "Donna Richoux" <trio@euronet.nl> wrote... > > This is quite interesting. Does anyone else agree with me? As I've > > said, googling evidence appears predominantly on my side, but so far [quoted text clipped - 7 lines] > Would you say "My daughter and possibly my son are going skiing" or > "is going skiing"? I'd say "are." I'd unhesitatingly use "are" there too. I think the difference for me is that I'm seeing the "and any attachment" simply as amplifying the singular e-mail rather than adding another separate item to the subject. So it would be a bit like "The clock and any wrapping is on the bench." Would you use "are" there? Matti > > "J. W. Love" <lovejw@aol.comma.net> wrote... > > > Evan wrote: [quoted text clipped - 24 lines] > Would you say "My daughter and possibly my son are going skiing" or "is > going skiing"? I'd say "are." Here's one for Matti: This e-mail, and any attachments, is confidential. At least if heard, that's ungrammatical for me, but I presume that it is grammatical for Matti. It can become visually grammatical for me if I enclose the "and any attachments" in parentheses (brackets). It's true that "along with" allows the verb to remain comfortably singular, but I think it has to be an actual "along with". Otherwise, "and" forces the verb to be plural unless the "and" binds them into a conceptually-singular entity or concept. "R F" <rfontana@alumni.wesleyan.edu> wrote... > > > "J. W. Love" <lovejw@aol.comma.net> wrote... > > > > Evan wrote: [quoted text clipped - 33 lines] > is grammatical for Matti. It can become visually grammatical for me > if I enclose the "and any attachments" in parentheses (brackets). It's giving me trouble, I admit. The plurality of the word just before the verb makes it difficult to retain the singular. But I am strong, and can overcome these trifles. You've buggered up your editing a bit by leaving in Donna's comments but completely removing my response to them, a justification for singular treatment in the case of "This e-mail and any attachment", which I freely admit is a bit of a special case. > It's true that "along with" allows the verb to remain comfortably > singular, but I think it has to be an actual "along with". Otherwise, > "and" forces the verb to be plural unless the "and" binds them into a > conceptually-singular entity or concept. Do you dispute the googling evidence, that most people out there do it my way? Are they all wrong too? No -- they're just more subtle than you lot give them credit for. If I google on "This e-mail and any attachment x", here are the results I get: x = "is" - .com 2230 .uk 269 all 4190 x = "are" - .com 34 .uk 0 all 61 Now that's pretty significant support for me. Matti "Matti Lamprhey" <matti-nospam@totally-official.com> wrote... > [...] > You've buggered up your editing a bit by leaving in Donna's comments > but completely removing my response to them, a justification for > singular treatment in the case of "This e-mail and any attachment", > which I freely admit is a bit of a special case. My apologies -- you didn't remove my response because you responded to Donna's question instead. Matti > Do you dispute the googling evidence, that most people out there do it > my way? Are they all wrong too? No -- they're just more subtle than [quoted text clipped - 6 lines] > > Now that's pretty significant support for me. Don't you see this as a special case, though? I'll admit, that doesn't mean you're wrong, and maybe you're right, because this is after all the sentence the OP was asking about. But if you're right it's in a special-case sort of sense. What I mean is, this sentence we're talking about is most often actually going to appear in quoted material from e-mail messages in which some sort of warning about confidentiality is mandated. I think that's typically going to be lawyer-drafted e-mail sigs in relatively large organizations (like Ray Wise's McDonalds) or slavish imitations of same. What you have is lots of people blindly using this sentence in their e-mail messages. In other words, it's boilerplate, so to say. All you needed was for a few people to make the "error" early on for it to catch on like Coop's griddle cakes. What I'm suggesting is that if you ask most people to examine or re-draft that sentence, instead of just including it in their e-mail messages automatically, they're going to want "are", not "is". It's *also* true that "are" is the result demanded by the Prescriptivists, but, as with Coop, when they're right, they're right. > "R F" <rfontana@alumni.wesleyan.edu> wrote... > > > > "J. W. Love" <lovejw@aol.comma.net> wrote... [quoted text clipped - 59 lines] > > Now that's pretty significant support for me. I admit to having been puzzled by such a preponderance of support, so I went back to look at the actual text that shows up in Google. A lot of the the hits are of the form "the information in this email and any attachments is" or "the copying of this email and any attachments is". A pretty fair chunk is of the form "this email (and any attachments) is" -- Google ignores the curvy punctuation. I can't really think of a perfect way to filter out the false hits, but I tried First, the baseline: "this email and any attachments is" -- 6,100 hits "this email and any attachments are" -- 13,300 ... so right away there appears to be a discrepancy ... "this email and any attachments are" -"in this email" -- 6260 "this email and any attachments is" -"in this email" -- 219 "this email and any attachments is" -"of this email" -- 5230 "this email and any attachments are" -"of this email" -- 8260 I tried to do the same with the hyphenated form: "this e-mail and any attachments is" -"in this e-mail" -- 2790 "this e-mail and any attachments are" -"in this e-mail" -- 7040 "this e-mail and any attachments is" -"of this e-mail" -- 4310 "this e-mail and any attachments are" -"of this e-mail" -- 6330 Google treats "e-mail" as two words (e mail, I suppose), and consequently the last "mail" is ignored, being beyond the 10-word limit. This may have skewed that group of searches. -- rzed "rzed" <rzantow@ntelos.net> wrote... > "Matti Lamprhey" <matti-nospam@totally-official.com> wrote... > > [quoted text clipped - 34 lines] > consequently the last "mail" is ignored, being beyond the 10-word > limit. This may have skewed that group of searches. I take the point, but it may be significant that your searches were all apparently for the "attachments" (plural) version, whereas the OP had this as singular. I would expect this to affect the way this phrase is used. Matti > "J. W. Love" wrote... >> Evan wrote: >>> For me, to get a singular reading, I'd have to make the >>> conjunction a parenthetical [quoted text clipped - 13 lines] > said, googling evidence appears predominantly on my side, but so far I > have absolutely no supporters here. Us'ns nose better. SignatureSkitt (in Hayward, California) www.geocities.com/opus731/ > what is right: > "This email and any attachment is confidental" or: > "This email and any attachment are confidental"? "Are". -- Mike Nitabach Thanks for your answers. Norbert |
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