955: Plural Words Treated as Singular Jul 21, 2017

English does not have much conjugation in the same way that some other languages do that add affixes to every verb to indicate the subject thereof. In the present tense, the only conjugation is that 3rd person singular verbs get an S at the end. This is fairly simple when using pronouns and most nouns, but there are a few words where the form of the noun does not agree with the verb, such as 'physics' which is plural in form, but treated as a singular, as in "physics is interesting" rather that "physics are interesting", though both would probably be understandable. In general, the singular form of a verb is used for when discussing exactly one of a countable item, or things that can't be counted, like "milk"; the latter variety can appear as plural when discussing types of something, such as "two fishes" i.e. species of fish. 'Physics' on the other hand is a field made up of different branches, but while the branches are countable, hypothetically at least, people tend to view it (notably not "them") as a single mass-noun in the way 'milk' may be, and treat it as a singular. Names for academic subjects are not the only sorts of words for which this occurs, but it is quite common for that to happen.