[ExI] Whimsy or error?

[Damien Broderick]

trying again, to correct some of the inevitable grammatical slips in 
any complaint about grammatical slips:

At 10:00 PM 8/25/2008 -0700, Lee wrote:

>And "zero of them is unaccounted for" just
>sounds terrible, and I'd say you're right to affirm that
>"zero of the politicians are worthy" is grammatically correct.

Do any actual living humans really utter either of these sentences? 
It sounds extremely contrived to me. "How many forks are on the 
table?" "Zero are the number of forks." I don't think so.

Of course, there are plenty of vernacular commonplaces that breach 
formal prescriptive rules, and too bad for the rules. "Who's there?" 
"It is I." Even so, I get very antsy with "Him  and me got married 
last night." "You're not planning on having children, I trust."

Damien Broderick


_______________________________________________
extropy-chat mailing list
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat