Learn English – “The back of his pants is/are…”

grammatical-numberverb-agreement

I understand that some nouns can only take the plural form (glasses, shorts, jeans, etc.) and so they take a plural verb. But in a sentence like "the back of his pants…" or "the side of his glasses…", should a singular or plural verb follow?

In this book I read, the author used "the back of his pants were bloody" instead of was, and when I googled "the side of my glasses," the first thing that came up was "the side of my glasses are bent," but I would have thought that it should be a singular verb instead because the subject should be "the back" or "the side," rather than "his pants" or "his glasses," similar to how "a pair of glasses" is followed by "is" because the subject is "pair." Or am I mistaken?

Edit: This question is unrelated to words that indicate portions, e.g. a number of, a lot of, a majority of, some of, all of, etc.

Best Answer

In English, when there are fractional expressions such as a half of, a part of, a percentage of, a majority of, a third of, etc., the verb agreement depends on the plurality of the nouns that follow them. For example:

50% (A half, A third, A part, etc.) of the university was destroyed by fire. (Not were because university is singular.)

50% (A half, A third, A part, etc.) of the parents were at the meeting. (Not was because parents are plural.)

[Examples are from Subject-Verb Agreement at elc.polyu.edu.hk]

If you change the word back to "back part (of his pants)" or "back half (of his pants)", the two phrases contain the words part and half and the rule applies. Therefore, the verb should agree to pants, not to back.

However, the word side seems trickier than back in "the back of his pants". A pair of glasses has only two sides and if it is the one side of the two sides which is bent, it should use a singular verb as in

The side of my glasses is bent.

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