All of tomorrow’s article will be about nailing down what scarcity is. Among other things, we shall see that everyone has lived with scarcity all their...lives? (Which is correct here, life or lives? Do not mean to be suggesting reincarnation.)
Will say right now for avoiding confusion that scarcity is being used as technical economics word, not implying deprivation or poverty.
You have asked a difficult grammar question. I prefer “lives”. This is definitely not correct (the two nouns and the verb should agree in number), but at some point you have to stop letting mere grammar push you around.
Collective nouns like “everyone” can be treated as either singular or plural, depending on whether you want to treat the collection as single entity, or deal with each part of the group separately. In your case, each person in “everyone” has their own life, they’re not all living the same life, so we should treat “everyone” as plural and use “lives”...
...but, the verb must agree with the noun! So now we have ”...everyone have lived with scarcity all their lives”. This sort of thing is common British English, but to my American ear it sounds very strange. In American usage collective nouns almost always take singular verbs, with a few word-specific exceptions like “police”.
You can’t say “everyone have lived” in British English, either. But number agreement in English is generally not to be taken entirely seriously, so “everyone has … their life/lives” is fine in both variants. The reason is that “everyone” works semantically like “all people”, not like “every person”, but just happens to nonetheless trigger singular agreement on the verb. That’s also why you can say “everyone liked each other”, like “all people liked each other”, but not “every person liked each other”.
Thanks for elaborating. Is British English generally freer with plural verbs on collective nouns, would you say? I was taught that it is, but by American grammarians.
Your analogy does not click for me at all, and I have lived with what can be reasonably described as scarcity. Do you have any better ones?
All of tomorrow’s article will be about nailing down what scarcity is. Among other things, we shall see that everyone has lived with scarcity all their...lives? (Which is correct here, life or lives? Do not mean to be suggesting reincarnation.)
Will say right now for avoiding confusion that scarcity is being used as technical economics word, not implying deprivation or poverty.
You have asked a difficult grammar question. I prefer “lives”. This is definitely not correct (the two nouns and the verb should agree in number), but at some point you have to stop letting mere grammar push you around.
Collective nouns like “everyone” can be treated as either singular or plural, depending on whether you want to treat the collection as single entity, or deal with each part of the group separately. In your case, each person in “everyone” has their own life, they’re not all living the same life, so we should treat “everyone” as plural and use “lives”...
...but, the verb must agree with the noun! So now we have ”...everyone have lived with scarcity all their lives”. This sort of thing is common British English, but to my American ear it sounds very strange. In American usage collective nouns almost always take singular verbs, with a few word-specific exceptions like “police”.
You can’t say “everyone have lived” in British English, either. But number agreement in English is generally not to be taken entirely seriously, so “everyone has … their life/lives” is fine in both variants. The reason is that “everyone” works semantically like “all people”, not like “every person”, but just happens to nonetheless trigger singular agreement on the verb. That’s also why you can say “everyone liked each other”, like “all people liked each other”, but not “every person liked each other”.
Thanks for elaborating. Is British English generally freer with plural verbs on collective nouns, would you say? I was taught that it is, but by American grammarians.
Some fictional evidence upon the matter. :)
That’s quite true. It’s just that the pronoun “everyone” is a different kind of animal from collective nouns.