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From: Ross Clark <benlizro@ihug.co.nz>
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: "a Pair of Panties" ?????
Date: Sat, 6 Jul 2024 09:06:16 +1200
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On 6/07/2024 6:14 a.m., Antonio Marques wrote:
> Peter Moylan <peter@pmoylan.org> wrote:
>>
>> But of course none of this explains why those objects are singular in
>> some languages and plural in others.
>>
> 
> Or country. In Brazil, inexplicably, they refer to seeing glasses with the
> plural noun and a singular article, e.g. _um óculos_ which sounds like 'a
> glasses' (note that things like your/the are inflected for number even in
> Brazil, so the weirdness is more conspicuous than this).
> 

"A scissors" is quite common in English. OED has citations as recent as 
2001, but notes that the usage was declared "erroneous" in the 1910 
fascicle where this word appeared.