One of the more popular grammar superstitions is that none must always only be singular. This belief has less basis and produces more awkward results than the idea that you should never step on cracks in the sidewalk, but it persists, even though if you Google none is none are you will get a full page of authoritative sites, none of which supports it.
None of which support it. Not one of which supports it.
Ah, and there’s the thing: those who spread this bit of syntactic spit-over-the-shoulder support it with the contention that none is short for not one or no one. Since you would say no one agrees or not one of them agrees, you should – they counsel – say none agrees and none of them agrees.
Even if the supposed derivation were true, it wouldn’t matter: etymology is not a guide to current usage. Even words that have their current form due to a historical mistake still aren’t guided by the pre-mistake usage – although peas was a reanalysis of pease, which was singular, we can’t now say The peas is ready. (Well, not in standard English, anyway.) But none isn’t a contraction of no one or not one.
OK, to be fair, back in the mists of time it came from a root meaning ‘not’ and a root meaning ‘one’ or ‘any’. But by the time there was an English, it was already one word, nan or non, and it was already being used with plural as well as singular referents.
And there’s the important thing: you can use it with the singular. Of course you can. It’s the less common usage – when we want the singular we are more likely to say no one or not one – but it’s entirely available. You can even use the conjugation to make a subtle differentiation: “We expected deer, but none have arrived”; “We expected deer, but none has arrived.” (The former sentence might be spoken in a park, the latter perhaps in a restaurant.)
Given that every authoritative, learned source you can find will tell you that none can be singular or plural – and given that anyone well read in English knows it by reflex – how is it that so many people insist on this mumpsimus? Most likely just because it was enshrined in one book that remains popular, even though it is inconsistent, self-contradictory, and prone to declaring many of the most revered authors in the language to be wrong.
The book in question is The Elements of Style by Strunk and White. If you want to know why people who know English syntax well tend not to be so fond of it, read Geoffrey Pullum’s “50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice.” Pullum notes that on the matter of plural none, Strunk and White place themselves above Oscar Wilde, Bram Stoker, and Lucy Maude Montgomery.
They also place themselves above John Dryden (himself no wild descriptivist), Henry Fielding, Oliver Goldsmith, and Somerset Maugham – and that’s just in the short list of citations in the Oxford English Dictionary. I particularly like these two illustrative quotations presented by the OED:
None are more ignorant of them than those learned Pedants…
—Tom Jones, Henry Fielding
There are none so deaf as those who will not hear the truth.
—The Times, March 4, 1963
So trust your ear, and ignore those who self-deafen with this superstitious hypercorrection. None of them is right.