Loss or lost?

Loss and lost belong to those pairs of words that can be problematic. Perhaps because they sound quite similar.

It is not uncommon to see loss used wrongly as a verb and lost wrongly as a noun:

(1) *No lives were loss in the accident.
(2) *His departure is a great lost.

Example (1) is taken from a recent news article below:

 AsiaOne - 14 April 2013

But loss is a noun, and never a verb. Lost, on the other hand, is the past tense and the past participle of the verb lose. Thus, the correct versions of (1) and (2) are as follows:

(3) No lives were lost in the accident.
(4) His departure is a great loss.

Everyone and their?

Is everyone singular or plural? Most people have no trouble pairing it correctly with a singular verb:

(1) Everyone likes the cake.
(2) Everyone has a role to play.

Hardly would any competent speaker use a plural verb for everyone:

(3) *Everyone like the cake.
(4) *Everyone have a role to play.

And that's all well and good. The indefinite pronoun everyone is singular and there's little confusion or disagreement about that.

Trouble starts when a pronoun is involved:

(5) Has everyone finished their drinks? (Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English)
(6) Everyone tells us that they enjoyed the movie.

If everyone is singular, why do even competent speakers of English use the plural their or they to refer to it? Is any grammar rule broken when we use their or they for everyone?

Here is what Quirk et al. (221) wrote about they in relation to indefinite pronouns:

The pronoun they is commonly used as a 3rd person singular pronoun that is neutral between masculine and feminine. It is a convenient means of avoiding the dilemma of whether to use the he or she form. At one time restricted to informal usage, it is now increasingly accepted even in formal usage, especially in AmE.

Rather than use he in the unmarked sense or the clumsy he or she, many prefer to seek gender impartiality by using a plural form where possible in reference to the indefinite pronouns everyone, everybody, someone, somebody, anyone, anybody, no one, nobody:

Everyone thinks they have the answer. [1]
Has anybody brought their camera? [2]

...

In formal English, the tendency has been to use he as the unmarked form when the gender is not determined. The formal equivalent of [1], though increasingly ignored, is therefore:

Everyone thinks he has the answer. [1a]

So if you were ever doubtful, you can now set your mind at ease and use they or their to refer to everyone.

However, because everyone and they are generally understood as singular and plural respectively, mixing them can sometimes raise eyebrows.

In formal writings, therefore, the more careful writers prefer to use his or the less sexist his or her:

(7) Has everyone finished his drink?
(8) Has everyone finished his or her drink?

To avoid the problematic everyone and they, a common approach is to rewrite by making the subject plural:

(9) All of them tell us that they enjoyed the movie.

Contributions...are

AsiaOne - 28 February 2013

The head noun contributions is plural, so the correct verb should have been are.

Stative vs dynamic verbs

(1) ?John is knowing the answer.

The ? indicates oddity, but why does the sentence sound odd? Grammatically, the sentence seems fine if we contrast it with (2) below:

(2) John is painting the house.

Both have the same structure of a present progressive, but why is (2) a possible English sentence but not (1)?

The answer lies in the difference between stative and dynamic verbs.

Stative verbs are verbs that express a state. This state or condition is relatively stable and homogenous through time, and can be conceptualized as being contractable or expandable.

Dynamic verbs, on the other hand, are verbs that describe an action. This action normally involves some change of state and has a limited duration or a well-defined beginning and end.

The difference is an important one.

A dynamic verb in the present progressive, such as painting in sentence (2), can signify an on-going activity coinciding with present time.

A stative verb such as know, on the other hand, cannot normally be marked progressive. Being indefinitely contractable or expandable, it is easily accommodated by the present-time frame:

(3) John knows the answer.

And therefore the progressive aspect is redundant, which explains why sentence (1) is odd.

An US soldier?

ChannelNewsAsia - 3 March 2013

The article An before US is wrong. The correct article is A, because the initial sound in US is the consonant "j".

The trick is to remember that the indefinite article rule applies to sounds, not letters. So we say an umbrella, but a unicorn.

Less vs fewer

People sometimes confuse less with fewer. Particularly with less, the common mistake is to use it when fewer is the correct word:

(1) ?We had less customers yesterday.

Though both words mean not as many, they are used differently. The general rule is to use less for uncountable nouns and fewer for countable nouns:

Less for uncountable nouns

(2) There is less traffic now.
(3) I listen to less music when I'm travelling.
(4) There's less smoke here.
(5) I drank less coffee yesterday.

Fewer for countable nouns

(6) She made fewer calls last week.
(7) I had fewer coins than you.
(8) Fewer than 50 people attended the talk.
(9) There are fewer mistakes in her essay.

However, with nouns that denote time, money and distance, we use less:

(10) He had less than three hours to make a decision.
(11) I had less than ten dollars in my pocket.
(12) She ran less than five kilometres.

Swings...were

Straits Times - 16 January 2013

The highlighted verb is wrong. The correct verb is were.

As has been noted elsewhere in this blog, this kind of subject-verb agreement mistake is common because the head noun is obscured by intervening elements.

In the above, the head noun swings is buried in a noun phrase (NP) modified by a long prepositional phrase (PP):

[the swings [in voter sentiment among the undecided middle ground]PP]NP

The prepositional phrase contains two singular nouns (sentiment and ground), either of which could have been mistaken as the subject, leading to the wrong use of was.

Here's another one from the online ChannelNewsAsia:

ChannelNewsAsia - 23 January 2013

The correct verb is was since the head noun nature is singular.