How to improve writing (no. 92)

I had to read the sentence a second time:

A couple of weeks ago around dinnertime, neither my husband nor I were in the cooking mood.

Jeez, that’s in The New Yorker, in print, for crying out loud. I’ll fix it:

A couple of weeks ago around dinnertime, neither my husband nor I was in the cooking mood.

Every writer slips up. I speak from experience. But see the sentence above, beginning Jeez.

Garner’s Modern English Usage on neither . . . nor : “This construction takes a singular verb when the alternatives are singular or when the second alternative is singular.”

Related reading
All OCA “How to improve writing” posts (Pinboard)

[This post is no. 92 in a series dedicated to improving stray bits of public prose.]