for an ad-free Fetcheveryone experience!

Grammar pedants - help please.

95 watchers

Dvorak Mar 2022 9:26pm, 14 Mar 2022 24,963 posts	Quote Pin Dvorak I suggest you reply "smell". Or maybe "proprioception".
RichHL Mar 2022 11:31pm, 14 Mar 2022 18,640 posts	Quote Pin RichHL "Good and evil."
ChrisHB Mar 2022 2:25pm, 22 Mar 2022 21,605 posts	Quote Pin ChrisHB I have found an interesting case where it is normal to use 'a' with a plural: I'm going away for a stress-free five days.
Cerrertonia Mar 2022 2:55pm, 22 Mar 2022 16,026 posts	Quote Pin Cerrertonia Interesting. I initially thought maybe it's because 'five days' is being treated as a singular noun, by analogy with say 'week' or 'fortnight'. However, it doesn't work without the 'stress-free' or some other adjective in there. I can't say "I'm going away for a five days". I wonder whether it's to do with the ordering of adjectives in English (number before quality). I can say 'I'm going away for five stress-free days' but not "I'm going away for stress-free five days". The addition of an adjective (exciting, or stress-free or whatever) forces the 'five days' to behave like a singular noun, perhaps?
Cerrertonia Mar 2022 2:59pm, 22 Mar 2022 16,027 posts	Quote Pin Cerrertonia British English is, of course, quite irregular when it comes to treatment of collective nouns. For example: Our team meets once per week. The team work well together. Our staff meet once per week. The staff work well together.
swittle Mar 2022 2:59pm, 22 Mar 2022 85,103 posts	Quote Pin swittle If the words 'break of' were inserted after 'stress-free', there may be a case for those words being 'understood', so rescuing the 'a'.
Cerrertonia Mar 2022 3:07pm, 22 Mar 2022 16,028 posts	Quote Pin Cerrertonia Yes, it's an implicit 'five-day trip' or 'five-day break' or 'five-day holiday'. But I think it's the inclusion of an adjective before a number that does it. You have to put numbers before any adjectives describing qualities in an English noun-phrase. So when you have an adjective before a number, we decide that the number must be part of a noun - in this case a 'five-day'.
Northern Exile Mar 2022 3:18pm, 22 Mar 2022 8,546 posts	Quote Pin Northern Exile I agree with Cerretonia, the "a" in that context is quantifying the singular entity of a holiday (or suchlike) rather than the five days.
ChrisHB Mar 2022 7:00pm, 22 Mar 2022 21,608 posts	Quote Pin ChrisHB All this 'implicit' and 'implied' smacks to me of special pleading. No one saying or writing my sentence would think they're omitting a word or two, nor would they mostly notice the 'a' with a plural if the first nearly 70 years of my life are a fair example. If I have to come up with a contrived explanation, I'd sooner suggest that 'a five days' exists in some circumstances just as 'a fortnight' exists without anyone thinking of 14. I was looking at other languages and this example came up: Six years is a long time. So maybe expressions of duration, even with a number, are singular.
swittle Mar 2022 7:46pm, 22 Mar 2022 85,110 posts	Quote Pin swittle ^ '...nearly 70 years of my life are a fair example. . Should the verb be singular?