Useful animals or a useful animal

(Email Removed) (Masa) wrote on 06 Apr 2004:
[nq:1]Dogs are useful animals. This sentence is proper, I'm sure. So how about the next sentence? Dogs are a useful animal.[/nq]
I would say "The dog is a useful animal".
[nq:1]I feel that it's a possible setence, too.[/nq]
Anything is possible and explicable by ignorance or misinformation, but not everything possible is idiomatic or acc

On 6 Apr 2004 09:29:50 GMT, CyberCypher

Does the sentence "People are a primate species" fall into the same problem?
S&

[nq:1]1) Is it possible to say that dogs are a useful animal? 2) If so, how to understand the difference from the other sentence?[/nq]
It's possible to link a plural and a singular like that, but it looks just a little odd, so you might want to consider putting it differently.

But it's legitimate. I once made a list of similar examples; here it is:
[nq:2]We are a team. Potholes ar

[nq:1]explicable by ignorance or misinformation[/nq]
This phrase sounds very strange to me. "Explicable as ignorance or misinformation" or "stemming from ignorance or misinformation" sound better.

Mike Nitabach

[nq:2]explicable by ignorance or misinformation[/nq]
[nq:1]This phrase sounds very strange to me. "Explicable as ignorance or misinformation" or "stemming from ignorance or misinformation" sound better.[/nq]
I beg to differ.
Explicable=susceptible of being explained.
Replace "explicable" with "susceptible of being explained" and "by" makes more sense than "as".

Michael Nitabach (Email Removed) wrote on 06 Apr 2004:
[nq:2]explicable by ignorance or misinformation[/nq]
[nq:1]This phrase sounds very strange to me. "Explicable as ignorance or misinformation" or "stemming from ignorance or misinformation" sound better.[/nq]
Ya pays yer munie and ya takes yer choyce. Ifn ya doanlaikit, doanyuzit.

Franke: EFL teacher & medical editor.
F

[nq:2]I would say "The dog is a useful animal". Anything ... it. One is good English and the other is not.[/nq]
[nq:1]Does the sentence "People are a primate species" fall into the same problem?[/nq]
I think so, but it could be easily fixed by adding "members of" or just "of" after the "are".

Skitt (in Hayward, California)
www.geocities.com/opus731/

[nq:1]But it's legitimate. I once made a list of similar examples; here it is:[/nq]
It's very interesting to see that most of you say that it's an odd sentence, but not go as far as to say that it's grammatically incorrect. If it's obviously wrong from the grammatical point of view, I wanted to know how it is, so I asked this question here.
But got none of such comments as I expected,

"Skitt" (Email Removed) wrote on 06 Apr 2004:
[nq:2]Does the sentence "People are a primate species" fall into the same problem?[/nq]
[nq:1]I think so, but it could be easily fixed by adding "members of" or just "of" after the "are".[/nq]
It could be the same problem, but it isn't:
(quote)
species
species
A species is a class of plants or animals whose members have the

(Email Removed) (Masa) wrote on 06 Apr 2004:
[nq:2]But it's legitimate. I once made a list of similar examples; here it is:[/nq]
[nq:1]It's very interesting to see that most of you say that it's an odd sentence, but not go as far ... know how it is, so I asked this question here. But got none of such comments as I expected, perplexingly.[/nq]
While it may be legitimate, as Donna says a