If you or your child, advisee, or student uses Naviance to guide the college application process, you may find this thread worth reading.https://twitter.com/camulhern/status/1116391143145639938 …
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Sorry. I mean *use*, not *uses*
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Replying to @stevenstrogatz
A string of "or"s like this does not alter the number of the subject nouns in the sentence in which it occurs. In this case, each subject noun is singular, so "uses," the third-person singular form of the verb, is correct.
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Replying to @MathPrinceps @stevenstrogatz
Oops. A correction is, alas, necessary here, because of the initial noun in the string, namely, "you." This noun of course requires the second-person form of the verb. So the string of nouns is inhomogeneous, which means that no single verb form can follow the string.
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Replying to @MathPrinceps
And I am left wondering what the final verdict is: use or uses? cc
@BCDreyer (with apologies for the after hours request)2 replies 0 retweets 1 like -
Replying to @stevenstrogatz @BCDreyer
As a practical matter, the principal question is: how many readers will notice the issue, and be distracted by it? Grammar does have a logical structure, but native speakers of a language have seldom felt bound by it; what tends to matter is what one can get away with.
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On the whole, I think most writers conclude that it is better to avoid such struggles than to resolve them by recourse to recondite grammatical principles. Almost always one can devise an alternative formulation in which no problem arises. I have proposed one above in this case.
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Replying to @MathPrinceps @BCDreyer
Right. This little conundrum could have been avoided with a bit of judicious re-writing. But I still think it’s a fun puzzle.
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Well, its direct resolution is also as I have proposed above, I believe. When a sentence's subject is composite and inhomogeneous in this way, one simply must include multiple verb forms in the sentence -- if, that is, one wants to preserve grammatical coherence. It's inelegant.
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