While fine-tuning my book
English Plain and Simple for its second printing in March of 2005, I received e-mail from faraway Stockholm with this note: “Here’s a conundrum, Jose: Should it be ‘There is more than one way to skin a cat’ or ‘There are more than one way to skin a cat’? Consider this as a question submitted to your
Manila Times column.”
The e-mail was from my cyberspace friend Niels Hovmöller, a Swedish secondary school English teacher and educational software developer who had admirably taken it upon himself to help me put my book’s English on even firmer footing. Purely for love of the language, he had gone over my book’s text by line and word for word, promptly e-mailing me incisive—and sometimes tart—comments every time he found some doubtful grammar or semantic usage.
Before answering Niels’ riddle, though, I had to make sure precisely what “conundrum” means. I decided to answer that riddle based on the second of three definitions of “conundrum” listed by
Merriam-Webster’s 11th Collegiate Dictionary—that it’s “a question or problem having only a conjectural answer.” I thought it was too farfetched for Niels, a knowledgeable and science-oriented teacher, to use the word in the sense of Merriam-Webster’s first definition—that it’s “a riddle whose only answer is or involves a pun.”
That second definition firmed up in my mind that in Niels’ English grammar puzzler, the correct usage is the singular construction “
There is more than one way to skin a cat” and not the plural “
There are more than one way to skin a cat.”
Now I’ll explain why I think this is the case.
In English, “there is” or “there are” expressions—the linguistic term for them is
expletives—are commonly used to declare or affirm that something exists, and the simple subject-verb agreement rule applies even to expletive constructions.
The rule: Use “there is” if the subject is singular, like “apple,” or if the subject is a non-count noun, like “water”; if the subject is plural, however, use “there are” as in “
There are apples.”
In Niels’ conundrum, though, it wasn’t crystal clear if the subject of the sentence, “more than one way,” is plural or singular.
Many people would argue that it’s plural because “more than one way”—presumably at least two—is being invoked. For the subject-verb agreement to reflect that plurality, they reason out that the correct expression should be “There are more than one way to skin a cat.” Many of us obviously would bristle seeing such an awkward sentence construction! So, to objectively determine once and for all if the usage has no possibility whatsoever of being correct, we have to conquer our bias against it.
One English grammar rule will help us resolve this conundrum—that
when a clause begins with “there is/there are,” the verb should agree in number with the first noun or pronoun being linked by that verb. Under this proximity rule, we should say “
There is a woman and three men in the car,” not “T
here are a woman and three men in the car.” In contrast, when we put the plural subject ahead in that sentence, we obviously can use only the plural construction: “
There are three men and a woman in the car.”
Now we are ready to frontally tackle Niels’ conundrum: Should we say “
There is more than one way to skin a cat” or “
There are more than one way to skin a cat”?
Following the expletive construction rule , there should be no doubt anymore that in those two sentences, the subject most proximate to the expletives “there is/there are” is “one way,” which obviously is singular. Therefore, the noun phrase “more than one way to skin a cat” that was built around that singular subject should also be treated as singular.
With this, we can be confident that Niels’ conundrum is now resolved once and for all.
Read this essay and listen to its voice recording in
The Manila Times:
An English language conundrum(Next:
The problem with “Hello!” and “Whatever!”) September 7, 2023
POSTSCRIPT:
Niels Hovmøller and I lost touch with each other after the publication of "An English language conundrum" in The Manila Times in March of 2005. But last June or almost 15 years later, I e-mailed Niels twice just to let him know that I was doing the book’s third updated edition. There was no response. I then checked Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social media websites but they had no information about Niels. A few days later, however, I received e-mail from a former president of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Dan Larhammar, a molecular cell biology professor, wrote: “Niels sadly passed away in 2008, much too early, he was only 68... I had the pleasure to overlap with him in the board of the Swedish Skeptics’ Association for several years. We interacted closely when he skillfully translated to Swedish a long chapter from an American textbook about evolution. This text is still available for use by Swedish biology teachers and anyone interested in evolution.”
Receiving that e-mail overwhelmed me with sadness and regret, but I regained my fortitude and equanimity when I realized how fortunate I am to have met and interacted—if so briefly and only in cyberspace at that—with such a remarkably intelligent and
intellectually stimulating human being as Niels Hovmøller.Visit Jose Carillo’s English Forum, http://josecarilloforum.com. You can follow me on Facebook and Twitter and e-mail me at j8carillo@yahoo.com.
