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I was just looking at some programming comments that are full of Euroenglish/ESL English etc, most of which I know how to fix into native "standard" English, until I came to this line:

  • But here we use a fixed array, so that .rgba swizzling etc work.

This feels wrong to me but logically makes sense. "Swizzling" is a singular and the only explicitly mentioned subject of the clause so a singular verb "works" sounds better.

But the etc strongly implies that "swizzling" is not alone. If it were an explicit list like "So that swizzling and twiddling work" or "So that swizzling and twiddling etc. work" then the choice of plural verb "work" is an easy one.

I suppose it's because "etc." only implies that there might be other subjects, but there also might not be any others.

I couldn't find this specific case of verb agreement anywhere. Does it appear in any style guides? How do other English native speakers feel about it?

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    I don't see why you feel like [noun] etc. is a special case. Would you feel the same about [noun] and such, or [noun] and things like that? To me, they're obviously plural if you've added at least one "similar thing" to at least one explicitly stated [noun]. It would be the same with [noun] and things like that (if indeed there are any others) - whether the "others" actually exist is irrelevant, they've been referenced, so they affect syntax.
    – FumbleFingers
    Commented May 5 at 10:19
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    @FF More than one anomalous example of agreement exists in English.
    – Edwin Ashworth
    Commented May 5 at 14:58
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    oic. It's wasn't so much Stuart F's comment there that clarified things for me. It all fell into place when I read your comment saying that you might understand etc. as being equivalent to for example. I see what you're getting at now, since in your own example, ...so that .rgba swizzling for example works would be perfectly correct, And there's an argument for saying that since etc. isn't really "English" in the first place, native Anglophones won't necessarily all agree on exactly how to incorporate it into our own language.
    – FumbleFingers
    Commented May 6 at 10:36
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    "introspecting our native language"? Well, I suppose each of us is different in that respect. For example. I cringe if I read (or hear a reasonably well-spoken person say) "I would of baked a cake", because to me there's just no way to parse it syntactically. But I'm quite comfortable with "If I had have known you were coming..." regardless of what grammarians and linguists think of it, whereas non-contracted "If I would have known you were coming..." just sounds like something a German might say (we natives invariably contract "whatever-it-is" to just If I'd have...)
    – FumbleFingers
    Commented May 6 at 11:00
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    @FumbleFingers We're drifting off topic but I feel exactly the same way. In fact it's a perfect example because some years ago I posted about "If I would have known" and only in the course of that discussion did I become I aware that all my life I had been saying "If I had have known" despite also knowing that "If I had known" was correct!
    – hippietrail
    Commented May 6 at 11:11

2 Answers 2

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The abbreviation etc. means “and so forth.” So when it is appended to a list of even only one noun phrase, the result is a conjunction and therefore requires the plural form of a verb.

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    GrammarReference actually has << Note that a verb, noun, etc., is usually left out the second time it is used. >>. I'd perhaps use << Note that a verb (, noun, ...), is usually left out the second time it is used. >> And the ellipsis equally means 'and so on' here. And parentheticals may be offset with commas. ... ... I'd probably usually switch to the plural verb form, though.
    – Edwin Ashworth
    Commented May 5 at 14:53
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    It may literally mean "and the rest" (not "and so forth") but is often used more loosely with a meaning closer to "or whatever" or "and anything I haven't thought of" or "which may or may not cover everything" or other even vaguer things. So you need to figure out what it means in the specific context, not assume everything still means what it meant 2000 years ago.
    – Stuart F
    Commented May 5 at 16:27
  • Yes, here it is basically a metonymy for *that stuff we may use with fixed arrays".
    – Phil Sweet
    Commented May 5 at 18:06
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    @StuartF: Yes I think you've identified what it is about it that sets of my native speaker intuition! Logically I know that "etc" is supposed to literally mean "and the rest" but as a native speaker I know it is also used for things like "for example" and "or whatever it's called" etc. When used in such ways it does not necessarily create a list. A contrived example: "I saw a truck, pickup, etc."
    – hippietrail
    Commented May 6 at 5:46
  • Interesting, @hippietrail. In your example, what does the etc mean. The only parse that occurs to me personally is something like “and other properties [of the truck],” but that would make it a summary of a list.
    – PaulTanenbaum
    Commented May 6 at 11:41
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I suppose it's because "etc." only implies that there might be other subjects, but there also might not be any others.

That's not correct. et cetera entails others. The phrase merely avoids naming them.

[Aside: speaking of entailment, et cetera was used in Shakespeare's day as a euphemism for "tail" etc, in the lewd sense of those words.]

You will find definitions of et cetera that say something to the effect that it is appended to a list to avoid mentioning all of the other relevant possibilities individually. But the literal meaning is simply "and others" and it can be appended to a singleton.

The phrase is often understood in context to mean "and others that are similar" but there is no requirement that multiple items precede et cetera in order to establish a broader basis for understanding what would be similar.

Compare:

There's a section on the form for demographics, where they ask for your name, etc.

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  • So you'd also use << But here we use a fixed array, so that rgba swizzling ... work >>?
    – Edwin Ashworth
    Commented May 5 at 18:34
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    @EdwinAshworth If by the ellipsis (swizzling ... work) you mean to include "etc" then yes. "so that [swizzling etc] work". That is, "so that swizzling and others (like swizzling) work". But if etc is omitted it should be works.
    – TimR
    Commented May 5 at 18:56
  • The ellipsis I'm showing is another way of saying 'and so on', not in this case indicating a retrievable ellipted string. As in 1, 2, 3, ... .
    – Edwin Ashworth
    Commented May 5 at 21:50
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    @Edwin I think you'd need to use commas to make it clear it's a list: "so that .rgba swizzling, ..., work." But either way it looks clunky to me and I'd use "etc." instead.
    – wjandrea
    Commented May 5 at 22:35
  • Perhaps only with ellipses following two or more actual examples, wjandrea (though the ellipsis is more ambiguous than 'etc'). I did observe the protocol with the numerical example.
    – Edwin Ashworth
    Commented May 5 at 22:47

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