Two Grammatical Conundra

In a recent issue of The New Yorker, Jack Zipes is quoted as having written that fairy tales attempt to “humanize bestial and barbaric forces, which have terrorized our minds and communities in concrete ways.” My eye alighted on the word minds. It suggested that Zipes had wandered into a syntactical briar patch I had often found myself in, never once escaping without multiple scratches.

To me, Zipes’s use of the plural made it sound if he were saying that we had multiple minds, as if in a science-fictiony fairy tale. But should he have written “terrorized our mind”? That sounds like another science-fiction story, where we all share a common mind.

The number conundrum, as I call it, comes up with surprising frequency. “All the students brought their mothers to class.” Sure, some people have two moms, but everybody? “All the students brought their mother to class.” One mother for the whole class??

It always seems that both options are problematic. You either have to choose your poison, or recast the sentence with singular instead of plural, which tends to up the awkwardness quotient: “Each of the students brought his or her mother to the class.”

Another grammatical question that comes up a lot, and that never seems to me to have a good answer, relates to the so-called sequence of tenses. H.W. Fowler described it in 1926, in his A Dictionary of Modern English Usage:

A certain assimilation normally takes place in many forms of sentences, by which the tense of their verbs is changed to the past when they are made into clauses dependent on another sentence whose verb is past, even though no notion of past time needs to be introduced into the clause.

That sounds complicated but it’s really a simple choice, as you can see from one of Fowler’s examples. Do you say, “I wish I knew what relativity meant” or “I wish I knew what relativity means”? Here’s an example from my own life. A friend and his son are coming to these parts to look at colleges, and my wife asked their schedule. Should I say, “Michael said they are going to Haverford Thursday and Swarthmore Friday” or “Michael said they were going to Haverford Thursday and Swarthmore Friday”?

In contrast to the number conundrum, both choices feel, sound, and I believe are OK. But which to pick? Fowler’s language, I have to say, isn’t especially helpful: “The change to the past tense ["what relativity meant"]  is normal sequence, & the keeping of the present (called vivid sequence…) is, though common & often preferable, abnormal.” So the abnormal is common, eh?

R.W. Burchfield, whose New Fowler’s Modern English Usage came out in 1996, observed,

The waters are deep and muddy. … The main point to be noticed is that a change of tense or mood is often obligatory, sometimes optional, and sometimes mistaken in sentences containing such verbs as “thought,” “believed” or “imagined.”

Bryan Garner, as is his wont, is more definitive. Garner’s Modern English Usage (2016) asserts, “When the principal clause is in past tense … the subordinate cause has a past-tense verb.” So Garner would prescribe: “Michael said they were going … ”

However, he allows for one exception: “When a subordinate clause states an ongoing or general truth, it should be in the present tense regardless of the tense in the principal clause — thus, He said yesterday that he is Jewish, not *He said yesterday that he was Jewish.” The asterisk indicates an example of what Garner calls “invariably inferior forms.” (Thus he would go for “what relativity means.”) The second sentence doesn’t seem so invariably inferior to me, but, as the saying goes, Garner’s gonna Garner.

As usual, Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage provides some relief. The editors note that most readers would accept both “The Lone Ranger said that crime doesn’t pay” and “The Lone Ranger said that crime didn’t pay,” even though the second clause describes an ongoing state. Their conclusion about such choices: “We suggest you will be a lot happier if you simply do not worry about them.”

What about you, readers? Any grammatical situations where you always find it hard to pick between two choices?

Author’s note: In the original version of this post, I quoted my Pilates instructor, Cathy, as saying, “You should have your arms in front of your collarbones.” I cited this as an example of the number conundrum since, as everyone knows, “homo sapiens is a one-collarbone-per-body species.”  As readers were quick to point out, a human being in fact has two collarbones. Next time, I will try not to let my ignorance of human anatomy get in the way of my point.