<p>This was in New York Times today:</p>
<p>The first tool is big plastic garbage bags.</p>
<p>“Plastic bags” is plural, but tool is singular. </p>
<p>Shouldn’t it be “The first tools are big plastic garbage bags”?</p>
<p>tool is the subject</p>
<p>Yeah but you can’t say, “The leader was Tom and Jerry.” You say: The leaders were Tom and Jerry. I think pronoun-verb agreement exists in English.</p>
<p>Tell me how many other grammar erros you find in the millions of sentences the NYTimes has published to date :D</p>
<p>Perhaps if they had inserted a linking phrase, it would be more grammatically correct; i.e., “The first tool /lies in/ big plastic garbage bags”. Or better yet, they ought to have dropped the plural altogether: “The first tool is the big plastic garbage bag”. As it is, though, I suspect it is correct for stylistic reasons.</p>
<p>It seems to me that “big plastic garbage bags” acts as one tool in that sentence, so the writer bends, albeit somewhat liberally, the rules of standard english.</p>
<p>If you put several big plastic garbage bags into one big plastic garbage bag, does it become one tool again?</p>
<p>I think the NYT is correct. Your counterexample of “The leaders are Tom and Jerry” is different from this case because Tom and Jerry are distinct entities. In the case of garbage bags, one garbage bag is no different from any other (for this purpose). It seems implicit in that sentence, to me, that “big plastic garbage bags” refers to the idea of a (singular) “collection” of garbage bags.</p>
<p>Besides, “tool” is the subject of the sentence. It’s a perfectly simple Subject-Verb-Object sentence.</p>
<p>Use in NY times is correct. With the use of the word first, it is distinguishing between designated tools, e.g., garbage bags, trash cans, and boxes, and saying the first tool of that group of three is garbage bags. In other words, the context has designated “garbage bags” as being only one of the tools.</p>