El Caliente

SC and his wife were at El Pollo Loco this evening for dinner, where we were treated to a new, not necessarily welcome, sight.

A life-size cardboard cutout of a Hispanic male model perched over a grill was located next to the cash register, bearing the legend: "El Caliente, Master of the El Pollo Grill". Your host can prove he's not making this up; look here.

As yet more proof that advertisers would benefit from not smoking whatever it is that they presently make use of, the chief creative officer of the agency responsible is quoted in the press release as saying "El Caliente is nothing less than the spiritual leader of El Pollo Loco and its millions of male and female devotees." SC can reliably report that he did not in fact feel any urge to genuflect before the picture.

At the bottom of the cutout is a message promising that even if "El Caliente" isn't in the kitchen, he promises that his "passion, devotion, and unusually expressive eyebrow are". At this last one, your host smirked: "Ah-ha! Caught in a syntax error, are we?". He then called over Mrs. SC to gloat about his find. After reading it, she pronounced the sign grammatically correct, and expressed bewilderment at SC's behavior. How could we have reached different conclusions?

Although there aren't any pictures of "El Caliente" available on the El Pollo Loco site (but you can see the model here), Mrs. SC correctly noted that, like Alan Colmes, El Caliente has one eyebrow prominently raised above the other. The difference in our interpretations of the sign thus comes from integrating the visual cues of the picture with the text of the sign. Or, in your host's case, failing to do so.

Essentially, there are two potential parses of the sentence:

(1a) [passion, devotion, and unusually expressive eyebrow]-NP [are]-VP
(1b) *[passion]-NP, [devotion]-NP, [and]-CC [unusually expressive eyebrow]-NP [are]-VP

(Key for those inexperienced with the Penn Treebank: NP="noun phrase", VP="verb phrase", CC="conjunction")

The former case groups multiple singular nouns together in a collection which can be treated as a plural because it has more than one member; the latter case treats each noun as a singular item, all of which are separately coordinated with the verb, which must therefore be singular.

Your host isn't sure how likely 1b really is, as can be demonstrated by simply pulling out a single element and trying to make use of the singular verb form:

(2a) "Even if El Caliente isn't in the kitchen, his passion and devotion is."

That doesn't sound very good to SC's ear; reader intuitions may vary. This doesn't actually work better for me, even though I feel like it should (since a singular count noun is right next to the verb, the fact which triggered my intuition the first time):

(2b) "Even if El Caliente isn't in the kitchen, his passion and unusually expressive eyebrow is."

Since "passion" and "devotion" aren't ordinarily count nouns (yes, I know, "among X's many passions/devotions..." is a perfectly valid construction, but that's not the usage here), it seems to me that "is" and "are" ought to be interchangeable in 2a, and that "is" ought to be obligatory in 2b. More than that, I find myself thinking that some kind of parallelism ought to hold here, with an "is" in each clause. But I find myself thinking that "are" actually works better in both cases, an intuition that annoys me greatly, because it suggests that it was quite odd of me to parse the original a la 1b instead of 1a.

Comments

[Neal Whitman]

Actually, when I first read the quotation, I simply assumed that El Caliente must be a unibrow.

Anyway, I'm not sure about the analysis you present. First, if you don't factor out the 'his,' and instead repeat it with each singular noun, then the verb has to be plural (at least in my grammar):

(3) ...his passion, his devotion, and his U.E.E. {*is/are}.

So in other words, even if each noun is treated separately as its own entity, the verb must be plural in this case.

Now if we factor out the 'his,' and get rid of the distraction of how many eyebrows El Caliente has, we get this:

(4) ... his mother, father, and wife {*is/are}

The singular is only OK if you can conceive of the coordinated nouns as a single unit, as happens with 'pride' and 'joy' here:

(5) ... his pride and joy is sitting in the driveway.

Give your uneasiness of (2a), it seems that for you, 'passion and devotion' does not qualify as a reasonable single unit. And if 'passion' and 'devotion' aren't close enough semantically to do this, then certainly 'passion,' 'devotion,' and 'U.E.E.' won't be.

But in that case, you should have been perfectly happy with 'are' in (1). So what went wrong with it? My guess is that you were struck just be the singular 'eyebrow' instead of 'eyebrows,' but the more interesting topic of agreement with coordinated subjects drew you away from the initial irregularity. If I'm right, then (6) below should be fine by you. Just imagine that instead of a U.E.E., El Caliente had an Unusually Expressive Nose, and now:

(6) ...his passion, devotion, and unusually expressive nose are.

[boris beecha kockoff]

Bad grammar is the least of El Caliente's offenses.

[Mark Martin]

EYEBROW? Semantics?
How can you read a lifesize cardboard Hispanic that says "Together, El Caliente and El Pollo Loco are the hot ones, tempting viewers to indulge their passion" and "His massive grill is eight feet long and four feet deep" and not run straight to the Baby Magic aisle?
El Caliente's passion is wasted on you, egghead.

[Joe]

I'm not gay, as I have no sexual attraction towards men: however, I do think that the guy who goes under "El Caliente" name is hot -- which is why I'm letting my hair grow as well. In the mean time, though, I'll get me some hair extentions so that I, too, can wear it like "El Caliente." I guess the concept of being a Don Juan is what really seems appealing to me, being that I'm a Latin guy myself.

[El Calientito]

This is bullshit. How can you bad mouth El Caliente? He's the handsomest man on Earth and his hair is like dark black wine. You don't understand Pollo; you don't understand beauty; you don't understand anything!

I hope they never let you eat at Pollo ever again, you monster!

[Semantic Compositions]

Sniff...no more BRC (bean, rice and cheese) burritos for me! I feel so deprived!