代词数词

so here's something weird and cool about English and languages in general is if they have a sense of number kind of encoded into them we call this grammatical number and and the way this plays out is in the difference between singular and plural in English the idea of there being one of a thing or more than one of a thing more than one of a thing there we go and this extends throughout the language and I want to talk about today the way it applies to pronouns so the singular form of me is me and that's the singular form the plural form of it excuse me the plural form of me is us because you know there are many assuming okay assuming I was cloned right so there's a lot of me fine that's singular but let's say I walk into like a cloning machine you know and it's like a part of it it's got little bubbles and it's full of this weird viscous liquid it shoots out another David suddenly there's two David's may the earth tremble but we have you know how do we refer to ourselves more than one me is us the grammatical number increases I'm part of the group now or for a more normal prosaic non cloning example let's say my sister and I are going out for coffee I refer to the two of us together as us that's the grammatical number it's plural so it's important to remember when you are writing or speaking to keep singular and plural straight throughout the course of a sentence or a paragraph because you don't want to mislead people into thinking you're talking about something else let me let me show you what I mean for example I would say I looked at my watch I don't have a watch anymore do you have watches do people still have watches I wouldn't I wouldn't say I looked at our watch unless I don't know a partner and I shared a watch right unless like unless my little sister and I both had the same watch and we traded it back and forth each month which is pretty unlikely in fana silly and so what I'm trying to say is that our doesn't agree doesn't match up with I or my this is plural this is singular that is a very strange place to wear a watch one is that at the elbow all right so we've got the dog wagged its tail right a dog singular it's is singular I want to make sure these things match up we made our beds this is plural and this is plural as opposed to we made my beds which who has multiple beds first of all but it would also sound like multiple people including me were assisting me in making my many beds there are two exceptions to this and they are you and today and either one can be singular or plural so there can be a singular you or a plural you there can be a singular they or a plural thing and I'll explain more about singular day later the important thing is to be consistent over all so if you establish that something is singular you need to maintain that singularity throughout the rest of talking about that thing so if I'm talking about cantaloupe and here's a test can I spell cantaloupe in real time without looking it up that looks right to me the cantaloupe was delicious in the next sentence I would say ate it in one sitting and it's not I ate them it's I ate it because there's only one cantaloupe you see that's what I mean about grammatical number and grammatical number agreement is you just want to make sure that this thing which we call an antecedent links up with the pronoun so the thing you say before you use the pronoun has to match up in terms of whether it's singular or plural you get that figured out you will be a master of grammatical number you can learn anything Dave it out