Merriam-Webster, Heal Thyself!

An email correspondent pointed out to me a striking lapse in the preface to a much-admired reference work, Merriam-Webster’s Concise Dictionary of English Usage (2002):

A number of common spelling problems are also discussed briefly. While the emphasis of this work is on usage in writing, a small number of articles is devoted to problems of pronunciation.

Mysteriously, the agreement of the main verbs in the two sentences is different: are in the first, is in the second.

What, in general, is the correct agreement form to go with a number of Xs, where X is a noun phrase (henceforth, NP) and Xs is its plural? Writers often worry about this. And if they turn to Merriam-Webster’s Concise Dictionary of English Usage for guidance, they will find that the entry on number (Page 532) is unequivocal: With a subject NP like a number of Xs, “All commentators agree that the plural verb … is correct.”

The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (CGEL; Chapter 5, Page 502) is similarly forthright: A number of spots have appeared is cited as grammatical and *A number of spots has appeared as ungrammatical. A footnote observes that the sentence a number of illegal drug operations has been uncovered once appeared in an Australian newspaper, but such sentences are “too rare … to qualify as an established variant in Standard English”; they are “hypercorrections attributable to overzealous application of the simple agreement rule.”

The “simple agreement rule” is the one that would apply to A number has been written on the box, where the claim made is about a number. When an NP refers to a quantity or number, singular agreement is appropriate. But with subjects like a number of people or a small number of articles, plural agreement is the norm. A number of illegal drug operations is not about a number; it’s about drug operations — more than one of them.

CGEL defines a small class of number-transparent collective nouns, including bunch, couple, flock, herd, lot, majority, number, and maybe a dozen others (CGEL, Page 503). When the head of an indefinite NP is a singular number-transparent noun, it can allow a plural NP complement in a following of-phrase to dictate plural number for the whole NP. This is largely obligatory:

 A couple of members have complained.*A couple of members has complained. A slew of problems have arisen.*A slew of problems has arisen.

And in some cases, using singular agreement would sound completely insane:

 A lot of people disagree.*A lot of people disagrees. A bunch of guys were sunning themselves by the pool.*A bunch of guys was sunning itself by the pool.

It seems clear that the copy editor for the 2002 concise edition of Merriam-Webster’s wonderful reference book missed a hypercorrection that someone accidentally inserted into the preface. Interestingly, the earlier book Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage (1994) had a slightly different wording:

A number of common spelling problems are also discussed briefly. While the emphasis of this work is properly on usage in writing, a small group of articles has been devoted to problems of pronunciation.

Here there is no hypercorrection. It is perfectly reasonable to say of a group of articles that the whole group is devoted to pronunciation; but it’s not reasonable to say that of a number. In CGEL’s terms, number is much more clearly number-transparent than group. (Group is optionally number-transparent — a small group of articles are would also have been acceptable.)

We don’t know who or why, between 1994 and 2002, some reviser of the preface unwisely replaced group by number. But so scrupulous is Merriam-Webster’s crediting of writers, editors, copy editors, revisers, reviewers, bibliographers, proofreaders, etc., that we can identify the cognizant copy editor.

It was John M. Morse. I remember having a friendly and enjoyable conversation with him at the Merriam-Webster stand in the book exhibit at a meeting of the Modern Language Association in 2003, so it gives me no pleasure to finger him as the culprit.

Sorry, John, but an inadvisable wording change led to a sharply unacceptable hypercorrection that you should have caught. At the next reprint, make it “a small number of articles are devoted to problems of pronunciation.”

By the way, notice that I’m being entirely prescriptive here. Anyone who thinks I’m opposed to prescription of correct usage is mistaken. I just think prescripivists should prescribe according to the genuine rules of English, not spurious rules like the ones I discuss here and here and many other places. In the case at hand the genuine rule entails that a small number of articles should trigger plural agreement.