I need help for this story I'm writing. I have been told before that you can't use the word "peoples" in a sentence because it is not grammatically correct or doesn't exist by many people.  If I were to say ... capacity of 150 peoples. would it be grammatically correct? If not, when can I use "peoples"?
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Let's say we are talking about the indigenous pukapuka who live in Pluto.  What is correct: "the pukapuka people" or "the pukapuka peoples"?  I've read somewhere the usage of "peoples" in this context, and it has surprised me.
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I want to know firstly if it's grammatically correct to start a declarative sentence with "Am". For example:     Am excited about the game today.   Secondly, if it is grammatically incorrect, then I wanted to ask how much "head room" there is for the above usage. I can't think of an example now, nor find one here at english.stackexchange. However I imagine there are usages of the english language that grammatically are illegal, yet have somehow become accepted as colloquial or idiomatic perhaps.
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I'm having problems with hundred and thousand.   If someone asks you, How many trees are in this forest? Would you answer seven thousand or seven thousands, because thousands are countable?  I know that you usually say seven thousand, but I also know that thousands are countable, so wouldn't that make it seven thousands?  And when you are talking about multiple countable nouns, you would make it plural, but the plural isn't thousand, it's thousands, so it couldn't be that thousand is the plural.  Why isn't it a few thousands? Is it because of an exception in English? Any help would be appreciated.
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In my , I provided the following, problematic,  wording (especially bold italic), and I need help to better understand this issue so I can fix my answer:1          The thing is the books. (Reduced form of Sentence 2.a)         Fundamentally, Sentence 2.a (the so-called "correct" answer), is grammatically defective. Recall there is another grammatical rule: the subject and subject's complement should match in number.    A clarification is needed here. I am not suggesting here, in this EL&amp;U question, that there is any such singular grammatical rule as indicated in the quote above.  The quote continues as follows:     The reduced sentence makes the disagreement between the subject's and complement's plurality obvious. What is one to do? Language is linear and we know "The thing is X" is better than "The thing are X", so we go with the former, which is the subject-verb agreement rule. But what is "the books" then? It must be thought of as a collective noun, even if it doesn't look or feel like one. Forcing something to be a collective noun is related to the idea of notional agreement.   Others noted that grammatically defective is too strongly worded.  There is no such "grammatical rule" for subject/complement agreement.  Please help me understand/improve upon my line of thought here.  I'm stating that Sentence 2.1 presents a fundamental "conflict" or "error" (however one might define error) at some level (morphological, syntax, grammatical, semantic):     The thing is the books.  (Or, "The thing is the objects.")   Based on the "obvious" morphosyntactic plurality conflict, the above sentence feels so wrong that I think many native speakers would think it "simply" grammatically incorrect. However, @F.E. gives counter examples:     And here are some more grammatical examples, where the number of subject and predicative complement don't agree: "They were a problem to us all", "That so-called work of art is simply four pieces of driftwood glued together" (CGEL, page 254-5). As CGEL says: "What is required is semantic compatibility, not syntactic agreement . . .". There are more examples on page 512: "The only thing we need now is some new curtains", "The major asset of the team is its world-class opening bowlers", "Our neighbors are a nuisance", "This gadget is five different tools in one".   I think all the examples given above can be explained as notional agreement.    Question 1: If we explain this phenomena in terms of notional vs syntactic agreement, where does "grammatically correct/incorrect" fit in?  Question 2: Can a simple sentence such as "The thing is the objects." be grammatically incorrect while more complex sentences such as "The thing is four pieces of driftwood glued together." be grammatically correct?  (The answer, in my mind, must be no; this is my conundrum.)  Question 3: Would it be better to say that Sentence 2.a has a low level of (linguistic) ?   Question 4: How about a low level of  and that it's semantically difficult to be (linguistically) ?    Question 5: Do we simply draw a hard line and say "The thing is the objects." is 100% grammatically correct?  I didn't particularly like this option based on intuitive notions of "grammatically correct".    1. Please help me and be kind; I'm trying to improve my understanding. I'm looking for cool, objective advice on how to look at this.  I numbered my questions so they can be easily referenced, if desired.  My preference is the final answer would sufficiently answer all the questions, but of course that can be done explicitly or implicitly.
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I have a question about using the phrase "some kind of _".  Is it incorrect to say "some kind of + plural noun"?     For example, is it wrong to say "are these rock-like things some kind of chocolates?"   I didn't use "kinds" and that kind of adds to my question. Is "kind" always plural, like "some kinds of chocolates"? Because although I'm using "some", it feels like "kind" shouldn't be a countable noun.  Anyway, I don't think I've heard of "some kind of + plural", but I think it makes more sense then using singular, since I think chocolates are countable. Please help!
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When I start a sentence with words like "someone" or "somebody", I don't know how to choose the right pronoun at the end of the sentence.  Examples:      If anybody asks you about the money, tell (Him - Her - It - Them) that it is in my bank account.     I felt that somebody was in the garden but I did not see (Him - Her - It - Them).     Speaker 1: A friend of mine helped me a lot.      Speaker 2: You should thank (Him - Her - It - Them).     Congratulations on your new baby! What's (His - Her - Its - Their) name?    Those are the cases or situations that I can think of. If you have any other different situations, please let me know.
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I think that referring to a non-specific indefinite person like everyone, anyone, someone etc. as &quot;they&quot; is grammatical and widely accepted as being natural at least in informal speech. For example, the sentence &quot;Everyone did their best&quot; is grammatical. However, what about referring to a specific definite person? Let's consider the following conversation.  &quot;My friend just got back from the shop.&quot; &quot;What did they get?&quot; &quot;They bought furniture for their new apartment.&quot; &quot;Are they married?&quot; &quot;Yes, they are.&quot;  Are these grammatical? Here's another example. A quote from the novel &quot;A Study in Scarlet&quot; written by Arthur Conan Doyle in 1886.  &quot;What do you think of that?&quot; cried the detective, with the air of a showman exhibiting his show. &quot;This was overlooked because it was in the darkest corner of the room, and no one thought of looking there. The murderer has written it with his or her own blood.  Let's replace &quot;his or her&quot; by &quot;their&quot;. Is the sentence &quot;The murderer has written it with their own blood.&quot; grammatical in present-day English?
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I wanted to get the usage of There’s clarified. I have read sentences like:     There’s a lot of projects on that topic.   It appears to me that There’s applies to a lot of projects, rather than to the projects themselves. Is that right? If that’s the case, is     There’s many students standing there.   not grammatical?
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My wife and I were discussing whether it is allowable to put an adjective in front of "of them". For instance, I could say "I want 5 cats" and "I want 5 of them". However, while it sounds perfectly normal to say "I want 5 new cats", "I want 5 new of them" doesn't roll of the tongue very smoothly.  If it is incorrect to place an adjective in front of "of them"?
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While reading an article I came across the following sentence:  The more successful group, in terms of their creativity quality of their solutions...   Is this grammatically correct? Can a noun be used to describe another noun?
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On the subject of "whoever" and "whomever", I was reading this but I am still confused:   What is the correct use of whoever/whomever in the following sentence?     I like your copy, congratulations, whoever is writing it.   Whoever? Whomever?   Is there a difference between US and UK English?
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Should I say     Some people use the word "flat" to describe their phone when its battery is dead.   or     Some people use the word "flat" to describe their phones when their batteries are dead. (I wanted to use "their" here to refer to the phone's instead of the people's)   or      Some people use the word "flat" to describe their phones when their battery is dead. (I wanted to use "their" here to refer to the phone's instead of the people's)   Which one is grammatically correct and why?
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According to Garner's fourth edition  When the verb precedes the noun percentage, a singular verb is required. That is, a higher percentage of them are, but there is a higher percentage of them  I'd love to have some elaboration on this point because I could't find any related information at all. Does this singular have to do with the pronominal there itself in general? EDIT:  Though serving as a plural when the need arises, series is ordinarily a singular noun. But it is also a noun of multitude, so that phrases such as a series of things take a plural verb. However, the collocation there {has been - is} a series has predominated in print sources. Common nouns of multitude: lot, majority, mass, minority, multitude, percentage, proportion, variety.  According to Microsoft® Encarta® 2009,  If you put the indefinite article a before percentage, use a plural verb when the noun or pronoun in any subsequent prepositional phrase is regarded as a countable plural, not a unit or a whole: A large percentage of the errors are found in this text. If the noun or pronoun object in such a phrase is singular or is regarded as a unit or a whole, use a singular verb: A large percentage of the electorate remains undecided.  However, a counterexapmle:  If you are speaking of the senators as individuals, say A majority of the senators have cast their votes
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What is the rule for singular noun objects of plural subjects? For example I and  agree that     They gave their word.   is better than     They gave their words.   To my mind, this is because each has but a single word to give and cannot give more. However, google seems to  on     They gave their life.   vs     They gave their lives.   As you can see in the linked N-gram, the second is far more common than the first. What's going on here? People (cats excluded) only have one life and it seems passing strange that they would be able, let alone willing, to give more.   If pressed, I would claim that the object should only be plural if each of the subjects has many. For example     They called their friends   If each of the "they" in question has only one of whatever object we are talking about I would call it ungrammatical to have that object in the plural form. Am I wrong?    EDIT:  This question was prompted by a comment on  on S&amp;F.SE defending the use of consciousnesses as the plural form of consciousness by referring to . The word was used in this sentence:     Looking for a story where people download their consciousnesses into bodies   It occurred to me that whether or not consciousnesses is correct, it should not be used in that (admittedly bizarre) context since each person only has one consciousness to download. I would have therefore said     Looking for a story where people download their consciousness into bodies   This to me seems like an equivalent sentence to they gave their word or they gave their life. In all three cases I would use the singular form of the noun since each of the subjects can only give (or download as the case may be) one.
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Someone told me that the English language is special (compared to German, at least) in the way that every noun could be used as a verb. I think this phenomenon is called supine. Is this correct?  Examples:   house → to house well → to well phone → to phone table → to table lamp → to lamp   At first it seemed to me that this would work with all nouns. But then I thought of the following nouns, and I think they can't be used as a verb, am I right?   person →(?) to person human →(?) to human baker →(?) to baker computer →(?) to computer example →(?) to example   It seems that nouns describing people (person, human, baker) are exceptions? But it works for "author" ("to author"). Hmm. "Computer" seems smiliar to a person's job to me (could be a human instead of a machine that computes).  But what about "example"? I think "to example (something/someone)" is not possible, is it? What would a native speaker understand/think if someone says:      He examples.      I want to example it/him.   Which are the nouns that can't be used as a verb?
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Could you please remind me what term linguists and the grammar people use to call it when it's used as a subject pronoun, but the funky thing is that it doesn't really refer back to anything in particular like he, she or we usually do which do refer back to a person or an animal that they stand for.  In grammar-speak, when it is used like that they say that it has no antecedent. I think I knew the term, but I unfortunately forgot it. I did a Google search, but the only thing I could find was empty subject. But the truth is that I don't think that's what they actually use in linguistics. Would you please refresh my memory?  Examples:        It's quite cold today outside. So, I don't really wanna go out.   Did I solve that math problem? Yes. Actually, it was very easy to get it cracked. There was really nothing to it!   Don't mention it! It's nothing. I really like to help people who are in need.
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I was doing 'articles' exercise on the web. I found this sentence,     Ben has a terrible headache.   Why 'a' is used here. The terrible headache is not a countable noun. Thus, 'a' should not be used here. I feel the correct sentence is "Ben has terrible headache." However, the correct answer is the following: "Ben has a terrible headache."  I am confused. Please do help me.   Can I say, "I had headache."?