Kathy Underwood

“Rules may obviate faults, but can never confer beauties.”Samuel Johnson

Here’s a quiz for you grammar and language buffs: What grammatical principle (1) permits you to ignore syntax for the sake of sense and (2) gets you a bingo (50 extra points!) in Scrabble?

The answer is synesis (\ˈsi-nə-səs\), which Webster’s defines as follows:
a grammatical construction in which agreement or reference is according to sense rather than strict syntax (as anyone and them in “if anyone calls, tell them I am out”)

Synesis is sometimes calleda subcategory of notional agreement or notional concord (because of its following the notion of the meaning rather than the form or class of the word in question). The agreement in question is that Synesis concerns agreement between a verb and its subject or between a pronoun and its antecedent. While the practice is more common in British English, it turns up in American English more frequently than you might expect. A simple example of synesis would be “Eight years is a long time.” Here, we end up treating the notion “eight years” as a single unit, not a collection of units. In other words, we’re treating it just as we would the word “decade.”

But we more frequently follow synesis when we use certain “nouns of multitude,” such as amount, majority, bunch, group, a lot, percentage, and the like (Garner, 1998). The syntax in question most often consists of the noun of multitude plus the preposition of and a plural noun. An example would be “A small group of the swimmers were able to avoid the attacking sharks.” Conventional syntax (what Webster’s Concise Dictionary of English Usage calls “school-grammar agreement”) would tell us to match the verb to bunch, which is singular. But synesis—sense—tells us to match the verb to swimmers, even though it’s the object of a preposition.

I should note that not all usage commentators agree with the concept of synesis—even when they use it themselves. But the trend has persisted since around the tenth century (in Old English), so I think that we can count on its continuing influence. Bryan Garner has aptly characterized the phenomenon: “The problem lies just outside the realm of logic, in the genius of the language.”

But what, you may ask, do I do about the linguistic anguish caused by our having no generic third-person singular pronoun in English? When should synesis be preferred to “school-grammar”? Controversy continues over these topics. But for a thorough and helpful discussion of bias-free language and issues with pronouns, see the chapter entitled “Grammar and Usage” in The Chicago Manual of Style. I believe that it’s the closest we have to a consensus view at this time.

References

• The Chicago Manual of Style, 16th ed. 2010. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Garner, Bryan. 1998. A Dictionary of Modern American Usage. New York: Oxford University Press.
• Johnson, Samuel. “Prudence.” The Idler, No. 57, Saturday, May 19, 1759.
• Merriam-Webster’s Concise Dictionary of English Usage: The Essentials of Clear Expression. 2002. Springfield, MA: Merriam-Webster, Incorporated.