Disagreements in the White House

Consider what the following statements by a contemporary American statesman all have in common:

• "Education belongs to everybody. High standards belongs to everybody.”
• "But the true greatness of America are the people.”
• "The goals of this country is to enhance prosperity and peace."

Some call such statements "bushisms"; others favor the label "bushonics." We call them examples of subject-verb agreement errors--and you don't have to be the president of the United States to make them.

In the first example, President Bush appears to have forgotten the basic principle of agreement: in the present tense, a verb must agree in number with its subject. High standards, of course, should belong to everybody. In the next sentence, he has apparently confused the plural noun that follows the verb ("people") with the singular subject that precedes it, "greatness." So let's agree that "the true greatness of America is the people." The president's final statement illustrates one of the particularly tricky cases of subject-verb agreement: Mr. Bush has confused the object of the preposition ("country") with the subject of the sentence, "goals." Naturally our "goals are to enhance prosperity and peace."

As the president himself once observed, "The illiteracy level of our children are appalling." And that are--or rather, is--something we can all agree on.