My husband has been a member of this board for several years and suggested that I post my grammatical questions here for help. I’m hoping that someone has an answer for me!
The majority of desktops and laptops are Windows 2000, the remainder is Windows XP.
Should it be “is Windows XP” or “are Windows XP.” Is “remainder” plural or singular?
2 & 3 : both Affected. That’s the more usual verb. "Generally, affect is the verb and effect is the noun (though they can both be used correctly as either, depending on the context:
noun
The effect (99% of the time)
The affect (a technical term used in psychology; most people can ignore it).
verb
to affect – to influence
to effect – to put into effect.
As to the first, I’d say “the remainder are” “Remainder” is singular of course, but if you can use “the majority are” you should be able to use “the remainder are.”
FYI Magnolia is my wife. I’ve been trying to interest her in these boards for awhile so I hope her first foray here is a rewarding one. It has already been impressive to her that she got such a good response so quickly from RealityChuck.
Obviously I wasn’t much help to her on this question myslef else she wouldn’t have posted. There seems to be no end of confusion of the uses of affected vs. effected. I think what she (or we in this case) are looking for is a quick and dirty test to decide when to use which word (akin to the “me” or “I” test where you remove the other parties concerned in a sentence and see if the sentence reads properly with just “me” or “I”).
Over in this thread I found the following posted by ren:
Ren got the above from dictionary.com and ren opins that this definition could use updating. However, if we do go with this it seems as if “effected” could work in Magnolia’s example.
As a final note, and I don’t want to be a jerk about an otherwise good response, the final example RealityChuck gives seems to be circular reasoning (ala the definition of a circle is anything that is circular or in this case “to effect – to put into effect”).
As to the question of plural and singular agreement it is funny (to me) that the problem RealityChuck raised with majority is exactly the one my wife and I went round-and-round on. Obviously I have no answer ofr this either and look forward to any clarification (since this is an issue that has confused me many times in the past as well).
Oops…I gave kudos to RealityChuck for a good, quick answer and didn’t notice another good (albeit not quite as quick ) answer from kuroashi. I was writing my post in the intervening time but I don’t want to seem ungrateful.
Effected Workstations might mean “implemented workstations,” but I would submit that it really could not pass.
Effect can mean to “bring into existence” or to “accomplish”, but unless the techs waved a wand and brought the workstations into existence, the word is not appropriate.
One can effect a change, but in only the most arcane usage would anyone effect a chair.
Similarly, one might effect (bring into existence) a group of users, but more likely the users have been affected by a change, decision, outage, or whatever.
IANAEM (I Am Not An English Major) but I do have an ex-girlfriend from whom I learned quite a bit about proper grammar usage, so here’s my two-hundredths of a dollar:
I don’t know if it’s a grammatical error to use an operating system type as a predicate adjective to describe a computer, but usually the predicate description of a system is either its hardware platform, e.g. “this desktop is a PC” or “that laptop is a Mac”, or the make and/or model of the machine, e.g. “My workstation is a Dell Inspiron” or “I just got a brand new Powerbook”. However, it should be noted that the pejorative “Wintel” is used synonymously with “PC”, the former term of course being a juxtaposition of the name of the most common PC OS with the name of the most common PC chipset maker.
At any rate, it would be more proper to say that a computer “runs Windows” instead of a computer “is Windows”. Alternatively, you could say that a computer “is Windows-based”. However, operating system types are commonly used as direct adjectives, e.g. “this is a Linux box” or “that damned Windows XP server keeps crashing”.
As for the singular or plural issue, “majority” and “remainder” are collective nouns that I’m pretty sure can be either singular or plural, so both “the majority run Win 2K while the remainder run Win XP” and “the majority runs Win 2K while the remainder runs Win XP” are grammatically correct. I’ve noticed that British English tends to prefer opposite usage tendencies than American English. I always love hearing phrases like “Parliament have announced” or “the Ministry feel strongly” on the BBC news.
As for the effected versus affected question, it’s a very subtle distinction that’s best described by example. A course of action gets effected, but things get affected by that course of action. If I effect results I bring them about, but if I affect results I alter them. The effect of rush hour affects travel times.
I would recommend that the first questioned phrase be “… the remainder are …” on the grounds that what you are really saying is “… the remainder of the desktops and laptops…”
First point: I found a cite that speaks to this issue: http://www.bartleby.com/64/C001/020.html. It’s a matter of preference, the only hard and fast rule being that you can’t switch usages in the same sentence. So the originally asked-about sentence is incorrect, but only because it switches from plural to singular. Both “The majority of desktops and laptops are Windows 2000, the remainder are Windows XP” and “The majority of desktops and laptops is Windows 2000, the remainder is Windows XP” are correct, although I do grant that the former construction sounds better.
I am a Linguistics major, but that doesn’t really mean that I can answer your question. Those of us in Linguistics don’t try to tell you how you should speak or write correctly, but how you actually do speak or write. Most of the time people tend to speak correctly, the times when people make mistakes tend to be when they are trying to remember what they were taught in in school. Otherwise, they tend to obey the rules of their language (not necessarily the rules that are taught in school).
Having said that, I would like to say that I think the sentence makes more sense if it reads “The majority of desktops and laptops are Windows 2000, the remainder are Windows XP.” This is because is/are is refering to the remainder of computers. If there was only one computer in the remainder you might as well just say “the remaining computer is Windows XP.” But if you changed that, the rest of the sentence wouldn’t work either.
Actually, after re-reading the cite, it sounds like the plural construction alone is in fact grammatically correct (at least in American English). The computers are being considered as individual machines, and not as a whole, calling for the plural usage. Here’s an example of singular versus plural usage ripped straight from my real life: “The vast majority of the computers in the DePaul University labs run (plural) Windows, but the student body wishes (singular) that the powers-that-be would put in a number of Linux systems.”
Still a sentence fragment. It sounds good, but it needs an “and” or a semicolon. If we were to say this, no problem, but as a written sentence…the hackles of pedants would rise.
Negative. A sentence fragment lacks one or more of the basic parts of a sentence. What I think you meant to say is that it is still a run-on sentence, I think the preferred new term is “comma splice.”
) answer from kuroashi. I was writing my post in the intervening time but I don’t want to seem ungrateful.
