Monthly Archives: November 2010

Decades ago, now-defunct McCall’s magazine ran a marketing campaign that featured portraits of sexy dames, including Carly Simon and Tina Turner, along with the tongue-in-cheek caption “One of the boring housewives who reads McCall’s .” Over a period of months, the trade journal Advertising Age published numerous letters from readers, ferociously debating whether the correct word should have been reads or read . Here’s the answer, courtesy of The Accidents of Style , Charles Harrington Elster’s useful new guide to grammar and usage: “When one of is followed by a plural noun and who or that , the verb that follows must agree in number with the plural noun: This is one of those blunders that are [not is ] easy to make .” Thus, the magazine, or its advertising agency, was wrong. The caption in the ubiquitous ads and posters should have been “One of the boring housewives who read McCall’s .” As a quick way of determining whether the singular or plural is correct, Elster suggests inverting the sentence