Plural of Singular?

Question

Hello, I have two questions re: singular/pllural.

"life and business goes on" (from Jabberwocky, Monty python)

Why not "Life and business go on"? If one can treat two words as one concept
freely, are the following also acceptable?

"life and death is an important matter."
"Peace and Prosperity is what every nations seeks."
"The King and the heir is the assassins' target."

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"If I come back as a horsefly, I think my favorite thing would be to land on
someone's lip. Even if they smash you, ick!, you're all over their lip!"

(from Deepthought, Jack Handy)

In here, why not "all over their lips?" Logically, "they" should have more than
one lip collectively...
I googled abit and it seems a sentence like this is correct...
"people who had lost their noses to an outbreak of syphilis"

What's the difference between the two?

Hope someone can elucidate for me.

Mister Micawber · Accepted Answer

Why not "Life and business go on"?-- Yes, why not indeed?

If one can treat two words as one concept freely, are the following also acceptable?-- Not the 3rd, certainly. The limits are set by the writer's conception of the entities (are they one group or two individual things?) and the reader's patience. The reader won't accept two people as one as in #3.

What's the difference between the two?-- It is common sense: only one nose per person, but 2 lips. If Jack Handy had written 'lips', we might have thought the fly was on both lips of someone, but that is not the intent: it is only one of their (someone's) lips. And the pronoun doesn't help matters, does it?

Anonymous · Answer

thank you so much for your reply, Mr. Micawber..
I didn't expect to get a reply so soon.

about Question #2..
That a person has two lips is something I didn't consider enough, and I can
see a mere horsefly's corpse wouldn't cover both lips. Still,
as a nonnative speaker of English, the biggest problem I have with

this is, which I should use (i.e. singular/plural) when "collectively"
there is more than one thing. In "their lip", since there are multiple
people, the lips to be potentially affected would be more than one...

For example in sentences like;
(1) "In some Burmese tribes, women have elongated necks."
(2) "In Japan, as a token of promise, people used to cut their (little) finger(s)."

A person has only one neck, but these women have collectively lots of necks.
In a sentence like (2), I feel somewhat uncertain. They cut only one finger
at a time, so using plural here sounds inaccurate, but again, collectively
there must be thousands of severed fingers in the long run...

The uncertain feeling I have with these may be similar to a sentence like

"More than one was American." If X>1, why use singular?

mc

Mister Micawber · Answer

In "their lip", since there are multiple people, the lips to be potentially affected would be more than one.-- Not for each person, no - and that's the point. It makes no difference that there are a lot of people; the only thing of concern is how many of the appendage each one has.

The uncertain feeling I have with these may be similar to a sentence like "More than one was American." If X>1, why use singular?-- This is a different case entirely. Here 'more than' is an adjective phrase. 'One' is the subject of 'was':

adjective: greater in number relative to something else ("More than one person stood up")

Anonymous · Answer

"life and business goes on" = "life goes on and business goes on".

Plural of Singular?

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