"The glory is yours to claim, for that is the wages of war."
The above line feels so natural to me, but someone pointed out they thought it would be grammatically correct to use one of the below options, all of which just sound odd to me:
"The glory is yours to claim, for those are the wages of war."
Doesn't sound right to me because "those" isn't the word I would use to refer to "glory."
"The glory is yours to claim, for that is the wage of war."
Also somehow sounds wrong when I think about all of the ways I hear the word…
"The wages of sin is death."
and I've never heard anybody say "…a day's wage." It's always "…a day's wages."
Also, I'm a little biased because this is for a script for a board game I am designing, called "Wages of War."
Is the first sentence really incorrect? Nobody I showed this to said anything about this until after I got the voice-over recorded, unfortunately.
Knowing that this is the title of the game, is that justifiable reason to leave it being that it's really a play on the title?
Best Answer
In a case like this, normal usage had best determine how to proceed.
Usage suggests that "wages" refers to "complete compensation" while "wage" refers to "salary". This seems common usage: wage earner (one who earns a salary), top wages, (high on the scale of compensation).
It may be the popularity of the KJV quote The wages of sin is death may have kept the plural form in the language long after it could have been abandoned, except to indicate more than one individual salary, and settled this question. That quote seems to have put in the English speaker's mind something beyond simple monetary reward for "wages". We can have a "wage scale", but probably not a "wages scale". We can write He has a low wage job and not sound unusual. But He has a low wages job does sound odd.
There just does not seem any reason to change "The glory is yours to claim, for that is the wages of war.". According to general usage, it is fine.