A friend asked me recently about all. Her sentence was going to run something like this: All I wanted was my blue bathrobe, a toothbrush, and the fuzzy slippers with the sheep faces over the toes. At first she wrote was, but then doubt crept in: should it be were?

 There are several factors to consider.

 

 — The main verb is was, and what comes before it isn’t just all but all that I wanted. 

 

 (It’s true there’s no actual that, but it’s understood. It’s like We’re eating the corn he grew. The idea is not We’re eating the corn and then, as an afterthought, an assertion that his sweater is now too small. It means the corn that he grew. That is the relative pronoun that introduces the clause, even when it’s not there.)

 

— Three things are wanted: the bathrobe, the toothbrush, and the slippers.

 

— All is sometimes singular and other times not. Think All are welcome, but All is not lost.

 

So.  We need to be clear that the verb agrees with the subject and the subject is not the three wanted things but the stuff that comes before was.

 

 All can be plural, but usually we know when that’s the case: all the kids are watching the movie. In my friend’s sentence, All is functioning as an indefinite pronoun, a word like many, or someone, when they aren’t modifying nouns: many are called, but few are chosen; someone’s at the door. 

 

 All I wanted means something like The sum total of  what I wanted.  It’s singular, and therefore so is the verb.  Think All is calm, all is bright.  All are calm would imply that there were several calm entities and that we had an idea who or what they were. In the same vein, we have All I want for Christmas is my two front teeth, given as an example by Jacquelyn Landis in her blog entry here: http://www.dailywritingtips.com/subject-verb-agreement/

 

Just in case you’ve hung in this far:  a few other points about subject-verb agreement

 

Like many sources, Greenbaum and Quirk’s A Student’s Grammar of the English Language (Longman, 1990) uses the term concord rather than agreement, which I like because it sounds appealing (it’s not just that everyone says yes: there’s something even more harmonious going on…). Maybe it’s the echo of of Concord grapes, or the elegant, pointy-nosed Concorde jet.

 

In any case, Greenbaum and Quirk go out on a limb in a Note: “It is possible to generalize the rule of concord to ‘A subject which is not clearly semantically plural requires a singular verb.’”  This seems quite brazen and exiting until you get to the end of the Note, by which point they’ve had second thoughts and begun climbing back down the tree, stating that because of the principle of proximity, which more often than not pushes to the plural, the plural might be the better default setting after all.

 

Conclusion: The verb agrees with the subject. All is singular unless there’s an indication it’s plural. And that’s about as definitive as it gets with an indefinite pronoun.