Should the quantifier “a lot” be taken as singular or plural?I would like to share this brief exchange of tweets between Catherine @cath980 and me on Twitter recently (April 4, 2015):Jose A. Carillo @J8Carillo:#Grammar conundrum: “There (are, is) more than one way to skin a cat.”* Correct answer gives you an A+ for grammar.
http://tinyurl.com/pzxo2ps(She didn’t answer the question but asked a related question instead.)Catherine @cath980:What is the rule for “a lot”? “There
is/are a lot of clowns in that car.”
@J8Carillo:It’s notionally plural, grammatically plural when it refers to a plural count noun: “There
are a lot of clowns in that car.” As stand-alone, it’s grammatically singular: “There
is a lot in that car,” meaning “a considerable number,” singular.
@cath980:Thank you, I thought so! Many people use the singular only, so I started to wonder.
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*For my answer to this grammar conundrum and my justification for it, click this link to my 2005 essay, “An English-language conundrum,” that I posted in the Forum on November 13, 2009. The question was posed to me by my cyberspace friend Niels Hovmöller, a knowledgeable Swedish secondary school English teacher (retired) and educational software developer.What was the Tree of Knowledge in Eden most likely to have been?I had this brief exchange with Hilario F. Tamor Jr. on Facebook recently (March 25, 2015):My posting on Facebook:Genesis Quiz: With its huge database, the Tree of Knowledge in Eden was most likely: (a) an apple tree, (b) a banana tree, (c) magic fungi, (d) a state-of-the-art computer. I explain why.
“The Tree of Life”Hilario F. Tamor Jr.: Banana is a plant and not a tree.
Me: You’re right, for botanically speaking “banana” is actually an herb. However, I used the word “banana” not to denote the fruit but to denote a “tree” in the dictionary sense of “something in the form of or resembling a tree.” I trust you’ll agree that it absolves me from the sin of wrong word usage.
Hilario: All is well that ends well.