Here's one for you grammarians

[desperance]

In the phrase "all manner of", is the word 'manner' singular as it appears, or is it some kind of hidden plural? Does one say "There was all manner of ways", or "There were all manner of ways"?

Comments

[desperance.livejournal.com]

It's a cross-Atlantic thing: in the UK we tend to say different from or sometimes different to; different than is American. And wrong. (Not just 'because it's American'; grammatically it makes no sense, historically it's insupportable...) And, inevitably, it's starting to filter over here thru' the TV and such. We should probably give up now, but me, I'm still fightin'...

[mantichore.livejournal.com]

Thanks, makes me feel better. But what really puzzled me was that it seemed to be quite recent. I can't remember seeing this until some months, maybe a couple of years, ago. It felt like those old SF short stories where the world changes due to some tinkering with the past, and only the hero remembers how it truly was, before the present was altered.