•November 10, 2021•
By Jim Baumann
NP Guest Writer

This is not a treatise on the horrible Three-fifths Compromise that determined during the Constitutional Convention that slaves should be counted as 60% of a person for the purposes of taxation and representation.
This is about the common “1 in 500” construction.
Constant reader Jane Charmelo wrote me with a question:
“This was on the front page of the Oct. 30 edition: ‘1 in 500 Illinoisans have died from virus.’ If the verb is to match the subject, isn’t ‘1 in 500 Illinoisans HAS died from virus’ correct? ‘Illinoisans’ is not the subject.”
There are two schools of thought on this, and even disagreement among editors at my newspaper.     Login or Subscribe to read the rest of this story.