Grammar question: is or are (banking jargon, ugh)

Factual Questions
1

I can’t quite determine which wording of this sentence is correct. Please note that I can’t change or reword the sentence in any way, as clunky as it may be.

Current version:

new and existing homes for sale as a percentage of households is very low

Clearly the original writer (a banker) believes that “percentage” is the subject of this sentence. I just can’t parse the sentence that way. What I believe is correct:

new and existing homes for sale as a percentage of households are very low

I think the “as a percentage of households” should not affect the fact that the true subject of the sentence, “new and existing homes for sale,” is plural. Even when I try a thought experiment and rework this sentence to emphasize the percentage part…

As a percentage of households, new and existing homes for sale is very low

…seems just as, if not more, wrong.

However, I’m not a fiscal jargon genius and I could definitely be incorrect. If I could I would recast the sentence entirely but I have been given strict instructions NOT to do that. Any help here?

2

Can’t, or won’t?

The way I see it is that the sentence is supposed to be saying that if you consider the ratio of the number of homes for sale to the number of homes occupied by households, that ratio is “very low” with respect to some context such as the trend observed when you sample larger areas such as an entire state as opposed to just one city.

I would argue that you could say the same thing by saying “There are very few homes for sale.” It’s still a relative, qualitative judgment, and the answer to the question, “Well, very few in comparison to what?” is “In comparison to what might be expected.”

Is the phraseology in the OP considered to be a professional term of art that cannot easily be paraphrased without losing a highly nuanced specific meaning?

3

As an accounting student, I’m accustomed to reading it like this:

[new and existing homes for sale as a percentage of households] is very low.

In accounting (which isn’t banking, you should note), we an entire sentences like that all the time. A single account name might be Cost of Goods Sold. And a single number might be something like “return on cost of goods sold.” Or we might say “Gross Income from Continuing Operations” which is of course different than “operating income.” It’s by necessity, really. There are simply too many things that need names and too many things that don’t have names and are very similar to other unnamed things. So the best way is to come up with little descriptions and have that whole description represent the entire idea. It can get out of hand sometimes. So then we relentlessly use abbreviations because we’re not gonna write all that. And if you get good enough at that, they’ll give you your own little abbreviated sentence, CPA.

4

Very much can’t. My client is… uh, let’s just say a very very very large and well-known bank… and the team writing this and outsourcing the proofreading to yours truly is ADAMANT that I not rephrase sentences or bitch about syntax. All I can do is point out typos and grammar problems.

Believe me, as an author I don’t consider my own words sacrosanct and would never say “won’t” regarding a simple grammar or syntax fix. I hate writers who are so in love with their own words.

I suspect the latter. See below. And I agree with your translation of this sentence and what the writers are intending it to mean. I would definitely recast this somewhere along these lines: “The ratio of new/existing houses for sale to total households is very low.” But my head will be chopped off if I suggest that.

Yep, gotcha. I’m frankly surprised there isn’t an acronym or abbreviation for this term; God knows there’s one for everything else.

Thanks!

Sigh. Three 30±page documents with nothing but sentences like these. It’s gonna be a long weekend.

5

I"m with Cerealbox - my vote is for is. If you mentally re-write it as “{inventory} for sale as a percentage of households is very low” it reads OK.

6

Heh. But that works mainly because “inventory” is singular, surely? If you mentally rewrite it as “{cats} for sale as a percentage of households is very low,” we’re back to the same problem.

Ideally the sentence should be rewritten to make sure “percentage” or “ratio” is the subject. Since that’s not gonna happen, I’ll have to allow my teeth to grind and accept that financial entities [del]suck at writing[/del] have their own unique style. :slight_smile:

Honestly, we’re talking about an industry where the phrase “We are overweight gold” is perfectly kosher. (The phrase apparently means “in our portfolio, gold represents an imbalanced proportion of our investments.”)

I’m just gonna swallow my pride and take my ill-gotten money from the Evil Big Bank.

7

Remember when they taught you every sentence has a noun and a verb? And that in the sentence “Do your homework”, “You” was understood to be the subject? (“You do your homework”)?

Apply the same principle for “The standard metric for the economy of …” new and existing homes. Does that make it bother you a bit less?

[In fact, in a lot of quick little stories on the economy the very short “new and existing” is used alone.]

8

In the original sentence, would it help to put a comma after sale and households?

new and existing homes for sale**,** as a percentage of households**,** is very low

9

That’s what I would also recommend. Interruptions like ‘as a percentage of households’ are usually set off with punctuation such as commas, dashes or parentheses.

10

But set off the singular from the verb with commas and the singular verb looks even worse.

The sentence should have are as the verb anyway. It’s a grammatical error, subject of sentence is written as a plural, verb needs to be plural. Doesn’t matter if subject is described by an appositive in the singular. If they want the verb singular, make the appositive the subject (percentage is) and the plurals the appositive (as new and existing homes).

11

Well the OP said:

Why not add the punctuation (to make the grammar problem more obvious) and return the document with a comment in the margin about the subject-verb agreement problem, so that the author can either address or ignore it?

12

It’s normal to treat an aggregate statistic as a singular. Far from an error, it’s perfectly standard usage. It is the normal way to treat the statistic.

For a real-world example, we can look at the Bureau of Economic Analysis as they explain the National Income and Product Accounts (pdf).

That’s on page 9 of the pdf. In that example, you can see two different statistical singulars in two consecutive sentences.

13

From the Free Dictionary:
el·lip·sis (-lpss)
n. pl. el·lip·ses (-sz)
1.
a. The omission of a word or phrase necessary for a complete syntactical construction but not necessary for understanding.

[The number of] new and existing homes for sale as a percentage …

[The term] Disbursements is [defined as] wages and salaries …

14

The sentence is horribly worded and should be rewritten. The problem is that the subject should be “percentage” (since that’s what is low), but that noun is placed in such a way that it can’t be the subject. Something like this would be better:

“The percentage of new and existing homes for sale is very low.”

I left out the “of households” part. I don’t know that it adds anything to the meaning of the sentence - if you do need to include it, you could say something like:

“The ratio of new and existing homes for sale to households is very low.”

15

Yeah, that’s the problem. I know that in accounting if you said “fluctuations in the costs of goods sold” it would be wrong. It would have to be “fluctuations in cost of goods sold.” And you certainly couldn’t simply replace the phrase with “the purchase price of inventory that’s been sold” or something like that. For a slightly more similar example, a common accounting metric might be “inventory turnover” and so if you express inventory turnover as a ratio of 365 you wind up with “inventory turnover in days.” But if you rephrased that and said “the number of days it takes inventory to turnover a single time” that might be correct (and not a good edit in this case, but that’s beside the point), but it would be a little confusing because that’s not what it’s called. If comprehensive income isn’t the same thing as accumulated comprehensive income which isn’t the same as other comprehensive income which isn’t the same as accumulated other comprehensive income, then things can start going down the toilet rather quickly. It’s one thing to fix poor writing, it’s another thing to fix the industry jargon because you don’t like how language has evolved there.

Again, accounting is not banking so I don’t know where the similarities begin and end, but in accounting we use a ton of stock phrases. It can be difficult at first, but once you learn those phrases, then it become much easier to understand these very long, seemingly complex sentences that a lot of people might have difficulty parsing. Even if those phrases could be changed up a little bit, just because it makes more sense to YOU, doesn’t mean it will to the banker. The banker is used to seeing certain phrases said a certain way. He can digest them easily. But if you change the phrasing, now he has to reinterpret the thing from scratch whereas before he might have been able to essentially skim entire lines because he knows exactly what they say.

This view is supported by the fact that the banker had to make the stipulation that the words themselves not be changed. I’m sure he’s had this problem before. I’m sure it could have even invalidated a couple of important contracts. It is indeed frustrating to come across the jargon of a discipline you’re not familiar with for the first time. And finance isn’t exactly the best with this sort of thing. Accountants are notoriously bad writers, far worse than most other business professionals. And sometimes the choices are baffling. For instance, FASB (the American accounting standards setters) worked with the IASB (the international standards setters) to create a new category of income to deal with a controversy regarding how certain assets were valued. The name for this new category in America is “Accumulated Other Comprehensive Income.” The IASB, on the other hand, (and I need to reiterate that these two organizations worked together to come up with this new standard so that it would be the same across the world) decided to go with the name of “Reserves.” You goddamned bastards. Why did you call it “accumulated other comprehensive income”?

But it’s important to note that if you looked at accumulated other comprehensive income and said to yourself “hey, that accumulated part is redundant, of COURSE it’s accumulated” and changed it to “other comprehensive income” or even “other comprehensive income that’s accumulated this past year” you’re now talking about a slightly different account. And if you wanted to get even more creative and said “all income from other sources this year” I’d have no idea what they hell you’re talking about.

16

Whew! Thanks very much, guys. I really appreciate the input.

I should mention that part of the difficulty in these documents is that while the author(s) / generators of this material are bankers, they’re writing to their private banking clients. While many of these clients are part of the financial industry, many aren’t. I’ve been specifically chosen as an outsourced proofreader because of my ability to see things from the POV of a non-jargon-speaking Earthling–the EVP who hired me wants to make sure that the clients understand what these folks are writing about.

Anyway, that said, I do understand that there are many stock phrases in the biz (as I said, that “we are underweight gold” thing was my introduction to the horror that is Investment Banking Lingo), and I don’t want to make the mistake of “translating” what should not be translated. I left the sentence as is, though it pained me to do it.

This 90-page report has been a real trial. I’ve also been specifically prohibited from correcting things that are definitely errors in punctuation (in U.S. English). For example, periods and commas must go outside quotation marks. As in:

…which refers to “periods of reduction”.

Believe me, this sets my teeth on edge, because there’s simply no reason for it other than this guy’s personal preference. Even if he were from the UK where this is correct practice, it doesn’t matter: the report is coming from a U.S. bank going out to U.S.-based readers. ARGH. What kills me is that this decision even goes against the bank’s official Style Manual, which (when I was first hired) I was told to follow to the letter. They indeed require periods and commas to go inside quotes, as God intended (at least here in the U.S., heh).

But for some reason this guy’s idiosyncracy, shall we say, is deemed more important than the possibility that knowledgable members of the public who read this will assume that the bank has crappy editors who don’t understand punctuation.

Okay, sorry, ranting. I’m just exhausted after finishing this version of cleaning the Augean Stables. Thank you all again for your perspectives; I really appreciate it.

17

You are correct. The subject of the sentence is the entire compound structure: " homes for sale as a percentage of households". “Homes” is plural. The rest of the structure is, in the long run, an adjective describing homes.

18

Yeah, that makes worse. Who knows what’s jargon and what’s nonsense. Although, I will say that as far as British and American differences go, I’ve been able to switch them up at will without having most people bat an eye. That punctuation thing is one of those things that I tend to go my own way on. The Brits really do have it better. Though I really only go the British way when there might be ambiguity as to who the punctuation really belongs to - the person being quoted or the person quoting. But, yeah, it’s a crap shoot.

19

You need to take a pace back I think. They want you to make it intelligible to the average Joe, so that’s what you should concentrate on, not the finer niceties of grammar and punctuation.

My bet is that you can achieve a lot by sticking a few commas and parentheses in. I have done similar work, in the days when it wasn’t so easy to make corrections, and that was my take on it. My natural reaction was to start re-writing, but that simply wasn’t possible.

20

You put the punctuation inside the quotation marks when it is part of the original quotation.