Mind your language
I THINK I have been won over by a charming Dane. Gunner Pedersen sends an example of syntactical error (many of our pet gripes being semantic, or at least lexical) from the usually vir- tuous pages of the Weekly Telegraph. 'Within the next few weeks,' it said in May, `Ms Millar's will also be one of the hands that rocks the cradle.'
Put simply, the mistake is to have taken the antecedent of the relative pronoun that as 'one'; in fact it is 'hands'. There is no doubt about this: both good 'old' Fowler and updated Fowler revised by Dr R.W. Burchfield note the error under 'number' and 'agreement' respectively.
But why is the error made? I think it might be partly a consequence of a little learning. I mean that people have learnt the danger of false agreement when the nearest noun to the verb is taken wrong- ly for its subject. For example: 'One of the men were swearing', when it should be was (the subject being 'one' not 'men). But in 'He was one of the men who have gone to jail' the question of whether the relative pronoun 'who' is singular or plural is decided by its antecedent — the word it refers back to — and this is 'men' not 'one'.
The other reason I can see for this error is that users keep in mind a singu- lar meaning which overwhelms their implicit syntax. By this I mean that if the construction was changed it could have the same meaning with a relative clause correctly in the singular; for example: 'He was the kind of person who jumps in before thinking.' Person is singular; people is plural, hence the difference.
Mr (if he is) Pedersen remembers that I was lenient about three years ago, when I wrote before on number. Well, leniency is my middle name, but he has now got me bang to rights and no mistake.
Dot Wordsworth
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