Plural or singular when stating that an amount is enough
A colleague of mine corrected the following sentence in a text I had written:
A handful of iterations was generally enough for convergence.
According to her it should be:
A handful of iterations were generally enough for convergence.
I am, however, confident that my original usage was correct, but I am unsure how I should motivate this.
EDIT: What made me think it was singular was not "a handful of". I thought it would be correct to say Five iterations is enough. because it is a statement about the number of iterations rather than the iterations themselves. When googling to find an answer I found a television series called Eight Is Enough. Is that correct because the noun is left out? Compare the sentences: Three friends are ideal. and Three friends is ideal. I would have thought that the first sentence means that there are three persons who are ideal friends, while the second sentence means that three is the ideal number of friends to have. But maybe my intuition is really off here.
EDIT2: Here it is stated that:
*Subjects expressing periods of time, amounts of money, or quantities may take either singular or plural verbs depending on whether represent a total amount or a number of individual units. For example, "Four weeks is not enough vacation time" and "Two days have passed since I asked for your response."
Isn't the first example here quite similar to mine?
Solution 1:
Edit 2
After your edit, the question becomes one of whether a group of things can be taken as a collective singular, such as in this question, which asks such things as whether a dozen somethings “is” enough.
The answer is that it can be singular if you are thinking of it as one thing as a whole, just as in:
Twelve miles is much too far for me to walk before lunch.
In that sort of sentence, you get agreement like this:
- A few more games is all I have time for.
- A handful of games is all I have time for.
- A few more miles is all I have time for.
- A handful of miles is all I have time for.
It really just depends on what you’re trying to say, and how you’re trying to say it. If you want to say that five matches is more than you can handle or that three olives is too many for a martini, then yes, sure you can.
But normally plural things take plural agreement — see the ngram below, which shows that a handful of men will usually take plural agreement because men is plural, no matter the status of the a handful of premodifer.
It is only when you logically group them as one thing that they take singular agreement. By doing so, that is what you are conveying.
But perhaps your friend does not like it when the council is decided on something, as opposed to when they are divided. :)
Original Answer
Your friend is right, and you are wrong.
When you have a premodifier like a lot of, a number of, or a handful of preceding the head noun, the verb continues to agree with that head noun, instead of with the notionally singular a lot, a number, a handful, which functions more like a red herring than anything else.
Ok, seriously, these premodifiers are really acting like adjectives, not like prepositional phrases. That means the head noun remains the head noun, and there is no change to agreement:
- People think the same way.
- Several people think the same way.
- Few people think the same way.
- No people think the same way.
- Many people think the same way.
- A lot of people think the same way.
- A number of people think the same way.
- A handful of people think the same way.
As opposed to something like:
- If just one out of all those people thinks the same way as you do, you win.
Edit
Although there is a bit of room for variation here, depending on just what the writer is thinking, there is a clear dominance of the plural continuing to be used after a handful of men in this Google N-Gram chart:
Solution 2:
In this case, the correct grammar is
A handful of iterations was generally enough for convergence.
This is because it is not true that each iteration was enough for convergence. You need the whole handful to obtain convergence. Thus, the verb was must agree with the noun handful.
Solution 3:
That one is actually really tricky.
If you used a numbering word, it would be clear:
- one iteration is enough
- two iterations are enough
- two or three iterations are enough
- several iterations are enough
- a very small number of iterations are enough (so singular words or "of" aren't the issue)
- a pair of iterations are
If the thing before the of was a singular physical container, it would be clear:
- a jar of jelly beans is
- a six-ounce jar of jelly beans is
- six ounces of jelly beans are
- two jars of jelly beans are
The weird thing here is that the exact same phrase requires a different verb if it's metaphorical (because then it's mapping to a small number) than if it's literal:
- a handful of iterations are
- a handful of votes are
- a handful of jelly beans is
As long as that last handful is literally that: a hand, full of jellybeans. Then it's like the jar or box.