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 scienc...