Do you know what every single one of all of these buttons do?

[suprunp]

Do you know what every single one of all of these buttons do?
(Inside MIT's Nuclear Reactor; YouTube)

Shouldn't it be 'does' by any chance? And if so then why does he say 'do' instead even though he seems to be talking really slowly and presumably have enough time and mental resources to construct and keep track of the whole sentence in his head?

Thanks.

 

[GoesStation]

It's very common in extemporaneous speech to forget the antecedent of a word. In the video, the speaker remembers that the last noun he uttered was the plural "buttons" and chooses the plural form of the verb to agree with it.

It's also more and more common to agree verbs with the number of the nearest noun instead of the grammatical subject. Learners should not do this, but you will hear it very frequently.

 

[Tdol]

Not really- you will hear people say that none of those involved do/does. Singular and plural are among the most complex issues in English, and trying to apply a mathematical formula, regardless of the speed of speech, will not necessarily satisfy the model 1 + 1 = 2.

 

[suprunp]

Not really- you will hear people say that none of those involved do/does.

None is a little bit different from every, I'd say, which leads me to the next question:

Do people as routinely say 'every one of them were murdered' nowadays?

Thanks.

 

[probus]

Do people as routinely say 'every one of them were murdered' nowadays?

Thanks.

No, in my opinion. It would hurt my ears a little bit to hear that. The speaker is trying to say that all of them were murdered so I won't say "were murdered" is wrong. But I agree with the answer given by GoesStation. Every single one is normally followed by a singular verb.

 

[jutfrank]

It should be does, yes.

This is my interpretation of what happened, which differs slightly from GoesStation's of post #2.

He mashes up the following two sentences, starting out with the first, where the determining word is every, but by the time he gets to the end of the sentence, he's forgotten what the determining word is, mistakenly thinking that it is all. The last thing he can remember is that he said all of these buttons.

Do you know what every single one of these buttons does?
Do you know what all of these buttons do?

What he actually says, of course, is something of a combination of the two:

Do you know what every single one of all of these buttons do?

The fact that he's speaking slowly is partly why he gets confused, in my opinion. There's more time for him to forget the exact words he uses.

 

[jutfrank]

None is a little bit different from every

Yes, none is rather different. It's very unlikely a native speaker would use a plural noun phrase or plural-agreeing verb after every. (Except in rare cases such as this.)

Do people as routinely say 'every one of them were murdered' nowadays?

No. That's not a typical mistake a native speaker would make.