Can ‘pants’, ‘glasses’, ‘scissors’, et similar in the sense of “a pair of [..]” take singular-number verbs? Why or why not?, Which ones / Which not?

Question

‘pants’, ‘glasses’, ‘scissors’, {et similar}, in the sense of “a pair of [..]”: singular or plural?

I always slow myself to use the singular, since the usage is referring to it as one singular unit. I.e., I take a preference for

"Where is my glasses? I must have put it somewhere around here.."

over “..are.. ..them..”, since semantically ‘the glasses’ (as in one singular "pair of" eyeglasses, used as one unit) count as one object. I realize that prescriptively this might not be correct, but pragmatically and semantically it is rather more accurate.

What about yous?, thoughts?, rationale?, basis?

See also this Question concerning 'scissors' specifically.

nota bene: If you downvote this, please state your reason (where able to do so). Constructive critique is welcomed.

Answer 1

Does this sound wrong to na­tive speak­ers?

Yes.

If it does, can I do it any­way?

Yes, but many people will think less of your language skills if you do.

I know lots of people who speak English as a second language and have lived and worked in English-language environments for decades. Some of them use incorrect idioms repeatedly. One likes to say "war broke up" instead of "war broke out." Another likes to say "go outside for dinner" instead of "go out for dinner." We all know what they mean, but even after many years it is still odd and disorienting to hear it.

Answer 2

Let me clarify a little further. Look at the words scissors, glasses, pants. Each is a plural. You want to be able to say, "The scissors is over there," but the problem is that you're referring to a plural and therefore can't use "is." You can say, "The scissor is over there, but then you'd be referring to a single one of the two parts that make up a pair of scissors. You could not say "The pants I bought is on the bed," and it would be ridiculous to say, "The pant I bought is on the bed" because we never refer to half of a pair of pants. I don't think the issue is one of tradition, but just basic subject/verb agreement.

Answer 3

Where ❓❓is my glasses? I must have put ❓❓it some­where around here.

Does this sound wrong to na­tive speak­ers? If it does, can I do it any­way?

Yes, it sounds wrong, the statement much more so than the question. Yes, you can do it, but the former will sound "incorrect" in an ordinary way typical of fluent speakers' casual speech. The latter will sound glaringly wrong, and something only a non-native speaker will do.

Some dialects of English, at least historically, used singular verb forms with some plural subjects, for instance the stereotypical Westcountry "them's the one, they is". But unless your accent matches, and you exhibit other features of a suitable dialect, nobody's going to think you're talking proper Westcountry.

That feature is probably restricted to basolects in any case.

However, specifically "there is" and "where is" are so frequently reduced to "there's" or "where's" that it's pretty unremarkable, in speech at least, to say things like

Where's the kids?

There's only five eggs in this carton.

If you were to use the uncontracted form, it would sound a little bit more wrong, but not egregiously so.

But using a singular verb form, or indeed a singular pronoun, to refer to something that's grammatically plural, is just not done by native speakers (except in specific dialects as mentioned above):

* The scissors is on the table.

* The scissors? It's on the table.

Unless you finish that sentence with "Mr Frodo sir" or "Professor Iggins", it will most definitely raise eyebrows.

[Added in response to a request by OP]

By way of comparison: every schoolkid's starter geometry set used to include a ruler, a pencil, an eraser, two set squares, a protractor, and a device for drawing a circle. Our teachers would always refer to this device as a pair of compasses (which is indeed the "correct" name). Most of the kids would continue to call it a compass despite the teachers' admonishments. (A compass is a device for pointing north.)

Of course, compass ends with a sibilant, so its plural has a whole extra syllable /ɨz/ at the end, whereas we pluralise scissor by just adding /z/ to the end, without adding an extra syllable. Maybe the fact that a kid can say "my scissors" for almost no more effort than "my scissor", but that "my compasses" is a bit more work than "my compass", contributes to the way that pair of compasses often gets entirely de-pluralised, while pair of scissors rarely does. (Notwithstanding @MichaelHarvey's interesting points about a scissor being idiomatic Welsh!)

Answer 4

Actually, you can use "is" if you're referring to the "pair" of pants, "pair" of scissors, etc. Each of these things is, in fact, two things made into one. So, "Where are my glasses" can also be expressed as "where is my pair of glasses." "Where are my pants" is the same as "where is my pair of pants."

This is similar to the rule governing collective nouns. The group is; the members of the group are.

Answer 5

The question of whether to treat the plural noun either as a singular or as a plural is not fundamental in my opinion. What matters is the object considered. The best descriptive term for all these devices is that which makes use of the words "pair of" in a phrase of the type "pair of < X's >"; but this is at best what "linguists" in days past saw as sufficiently logical for the purpose of providing a descriptive term or at least a correct identifying term; those terms using "pair" are still falsely descriptive: given a pair of scissors, we are not dealing with two scissors but instead with two scissors and a rivet that holds them together in a certain way which results in one single tool proper to achieve particular tasks; whatever the "tool" you consider, the same scheme recurs. It is clear that linguists of days past shied away from the usual job of providing a fully descriptive term. To compound the logical difficulty, usage has seen fit to introduce a would-be simplification in the way of suppressing the sole indicator of the object being a unit, that is, only the plural term in the "pair" construction was kept; that results obviously in flagrant contradiction.

So, the question about who is right in using a particular agreement, whether those who use a plural or those who use a singular is not relevant. Those pretending or feeling they are right in using a singular because they rightly consider that they are dealing with a unit are still wrong as they apply this principle to a term that cannot be descriptive of a unit, but name a plurality, and those pretending or feeling rightly that they are right in using a plural because the word is plural are still wrong because they apply this principle to a term that is falsely descriptive of a unit. There is no way out except that of a renaming: "scissors" and "pair of scissors" are not used any more, except for naming what they naturally name and the term "xxxxxx" is chosen for the unit. As a bonus, it becomes possible to identify a plurality of such units by means of an s truly representative of a plural: "xxxxxxs".