Jose Carillo's English Forum
Joe Carillo's Desk => You Asked Me This Question => Topic started by: clementejak on August 27, 2012, 08:11:57 AM
-
Hi there Mr. Carillo
Please confirm which one is correct.
1. Bread and butter is my favorite breakfast.
2. Bread and butter is sold in the grocery store.
3. Bread and butter are sold in the grocery store.
Thanks much.
-
Sentences 1 and 3 are grammatically correct; Sentence 2 is grammatically wrong.
In Sentence 1, “Bread and butter is my favorite breakfast,” the use of the singular form “is” despite its having “bread and butter” as an apparently plural subject is an exception to the usual subject-verb agreement rule. This is because “bread and butter” belongs to the category of compound expressions whose component nouns have become so inseparable in usage as to be taken as a single unit, thus making them notionally singular and allowing the verb to take the singular form. As I explained in the chapter on “Nouns and Verbs in Conflict” in my book English Plain and Simple, “bread and butter” is idiomatically a singular subject in the same way as the phrase “the long and short of it” in this sentence: “The long and short of it is that we have already discussed subject-verb agreement enough and must now stop.”
In Sentence 2, “Bread and butter is sold in the grocery store,” the nouns “bread” and “butter” are being used normally in the sense of two separate entities added together as a compound subject, so the use of the singular form “is” is grammatically incorrect. That verb should be in the plural form “are” instead: “Bread and butter are sold in the grocery store.” This corrected version is, of course, the same as Sentence 3.
-
Hi Mr. J. Carillo,
Thank you very much for your enlightenment.
-
Isn't it just necessary to put a hyphen in between the words bread and butter in Sentence 1?
1. Bread-and-butter is my favorite breakfast.
-
This hyphenated form, “bread-and-butter,” might also be used, but the form looks and sounds stilted when used as the subject of a sentence, as you have done in “Bread-and-butter is my favorite breakfast.” That hyphenated form is, of course, highly advisable when used as a modifier, as in “Her bread-and-butter occupation is teaching.”
-
I see. Thank you :)
-
Number one is right ;)