Introduction to agreement

hi grammarians today I want to talk about this idea in English that we call agreement so I'm going to teach you how to be agreeable and make it so that all of your sentences get along really well let me let me give you an example the dog barks as opposed to the dog's bark you see the difference it's funny because the S seems to seems to migrate seems to move from one part of the sentence to the other so what you wouldn't say is the dog bark that doesn't work and you wouldn't say the dogs barks I know that's that seems strange that you wouldn't want to have the s follow the other s but you actually only want to have one of these in a sentence so the dog barks the dog's bark when there's only one of something strangely in the present you know in the present tense it takes this s so Jake bakes a cake we bake a cake not Jake bake a cake which admittedly is a fun sentence to say but this is not in standard English this is not correct it doesn't it doesn't exhibit what we call agreement similarly you also wouldn't say we bakes okay if you're familiar with the Lord of the Rings books or movies if you remember Gollum the character Gollum is a weird little bug-eyed critter who's just kind of obsessed with the One Ring he has this very particular way of speaking that it's not strictly speaking standard just wild about that ring and the way he refers to everything is he just throws on an S on the end of every word he is every verb so if he's talking about you know hmm this is a magic ring that he's very fond of which he calls the precious he wouldn't just say I love it he'd say I love is it like so and that's not correct that does not but is not show agreement so the test here is really you can figure out whether or not you are using agreement in your sentences if you sound like Gollum because if Gollum were being grammatical he would say I love it so this is this is the sense that I want you to develop is you listen to yourself speak and you ask do I sound like Gollum the ring monster because if you do sound like Gollum then you're probably not operating under the agreement rules of standard American English or you're just doing a Gollum impression that's the basic idea behind agreement is you just want to make sure that that the parts of the sentence match up sentence parts match they agree they get along they work you can learn anything Dave it out