"That was nearly seven years ago. The love and encouragement has never wavered.”
They have never wavered. -or- It has never wavered.
I think the ear is fooled by the proximity: “…encouragement has never wavered” wouldbe correct and sounds good. But then what is “The love” doing for a verb? If it said, “The love is stronger than ever and the encouragement has never wavered,” or something like that, ok.
Take “Ham and eggs is my favorite dish.” The predicate noun, dish, renames a subject that is one thing, a combination of ham and eggs. As pointed out upthread, if you like a dish of ham and a different dish of eggs, then ham and eggs are your favorite dishes.
There’s some good discussion and examples of edge cases for compound subjects in this post.
There was even more discussion on the blog when it came to the following sentence (labeled Criminal Sentence 519): “Their capture and successful prosecution is what we want” (4). Some commenters argued that the police had one goal—to put the criminals behind bars—so capture and prosecution represented one idea. They therefore felt the verb should be singular. Others thought these two actions were distinct and the verb should be plural.
I lean towards thinking that custom and practice largely dictate(s?) whether a particular compound subject should take a singular verb, not exercising judgment about how closely “mortar” and “pestle” or whatever are conceptually linked. So I guess that makes me pretty conservative about letting new coinages join that club.
(I generally don’t love grammar rules that have a ton of exceptions, or where you just get to “use your ear” to decide, because they make English that much harder to learn and teach.)
I don’t think anyone is rigidly disputing that either usage can be justified. It’s more that it’s an interesting question to try to understand why one usage or the other subjectively feels right for various pairs.
No argument from me. I originally felt that it was entirely the familiarity of the pairing that made something “work” as a compound. Others have convinced me that the degree of association of meaning probably does contribute too.
And do you agree that it’s unlikely that a familiar juxtaposed pair is unlikely to be treated as singular?
I’ll add the same sentiment - if the pairing is obviously close enough to constitute a singular item in the mind of the author and reader, it should take the singular verb.
In the case of the OP’s sentence, either way sounds OK to me, and mainly because the pairing is close enough that a listener could consider it one item.
A few observations:
“Peanut butter and jelly” as a singular item is shorthand for a type of sandwich, just as “ham and eggs” is shorthand for a singular recipe of a breakfast dish. English is full of shorthand expressions and understood/implied wording.
The term I learned for situations like “The team is…” is that team is a “collective” noun, a singular. It can be plural - “Teams are vying for the championship”. This applies to a number of collectives - “crowd is”, “group is”, “population is”…
The cows are coming home.
The herd is heading home.
There are some anomalies based on common usage - again, what “sounds” right.
“The people have spoken.”
I assume even down south there in the USA which does not follow the British imperative on collectives, the “are” is taken as correct usage.