Poll: The wages of sin ____ death.

Not sure

Why 'is'?

Deen

Indeed, why?

wagesofsin

It's in the Bible

Brittany

The wages of sin are really what???
TELL ME

san

If you search in the dictionary, you will find out:
wage = noun [sing.] (also wages [pl.]) a regular amount of money that you earn, usually every week, for work or service
Then the word WAGES is plural, so the correct answer is ARE

^

Not in this case- it's singular. Damnation is not the same as a salary.

MrTrilby

Yet another thing the Bible gets wrong.

gardemarine

It is 'is' because the sentence defines what is death. We can rephrase this sentence as "Death is the wages of sin". What is death? It is the wages of sin.

Stryfe

Just because the Bible said it or it was translated that way doesn't mean it's grammatically correct. Wages can't be singular. It isn't in any other case, and the Bible doesn't get special cases. It's literature like any other.

Lynque

Hey!
God said it.
I believe it.
That settles it!

SimonTrew

It is singular because "wages" here is functioning as singular. You would happily have "the pay of sin is death" or "the reward of sin is death"-- and in the alternate, "the rewards of sin are death". It's impossible to match the number here, so one must take a pragmatic approach. Since "is" is the established form, stet.

Bartleby

VERY INTERESTING that 58% (at the time I took the poll) prefer "is". I can think of two reasons for this. 1) The sentence is always written using "is". That's the norm and, by definition, most of us adhere to the norm. 2) It's biblical. The religious among us (and there are many) are inclined to accept statements from the Bible as a literal translation. So "is" it is.

I voted for "are" because "wages" in every case but this one is used as a plural noun. (Wages are paid on Friday.) Also, "are" falls more softly on the eye and ear, making it aesthetically, if not technically, correct.

I was curious what one of my favorite reference sites, dictionary.com, had to say on the subject. It says that "wages" (can be) used with a singular or plural verb." It gives "The wages of sin is death" as an example, but doesn't declare that form of the verb as the only option.

I did a little more research, with my MS Word Grammar Checker. It allows the sentence with either "is" or "are"; however, the suggested change for "The wages of sin am death" is "is". (Lousy traditionalist Microsoft!)

sunhr575

"is" , notional concord, while "are", grammatical concord. as NNS, I prefer the latler.lol.

dawnngcm

sin is abstract noun

Madison

This is why I hate our language. Also, I have to wonder which came first: the translation, or the exclusion of "wages" from standard subject-verb agreement rules.

John McMullen

Subject-verb agreement indicates the verb should be "is" (and we don't have verb-object agreement in English). You can make the argument that here "wages" is a notional singular, but the word doesn't get used that way anywhere else that I'm aware of (you say, "The pay is a thousand dollars" but "The wages are a thousand dollars").

Granted that the King James Bible deliberately used archaic language, but I don't think this is an example of that usage.

King James

It wasn't archaic when they did the King James Bible; it's archaic now.