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I suppose it has something to do with pants having two "pant legs". Then a again, a shirt has two arms, and a brassiere usually[1] has two cups. But still, as a whole, it does not really make sense to to me to treat "pants" as plural... unless you cut them in half with scissors. But then you have another problem, because "scissors" is also treated as plural.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minor_characters_from_The_Hitchhiker~*...

Edited 2008-05-08 11:50 UTC

I really appreciate that. I am always happy when someone corrects my "four-year old boy" English

I guess it falls under the same sort of reason why those of the 'commonwealth' (NZ, Aussie, UK and possibly Canada) tend to refer to a organisation and use are, "Microsoft are a large organisation" - are being used in terms of plurality, meaning, the plurality of the components which make it up. In the case of pants - "your pants are on fire", and when referring to pants its quite normal to say, "I own a pair of black pants".

Then again, it is like the use of an before a word beginning with a vowel "an apple" whilst at the same time using an even though the word doesn't start with a vowel but sounds strange if 'a' is used. When is is used instead of are, in respects to pants, it just doesn't sound right and the sentence doesn't flow - it sounds disjointed.

Edited 2008-05-08 15:44 UTC

It comes from the French aswell [as in the plurality of "pants"], les pantalons but I'm afraid my German is somewhat lacking.

Another interesting one is data which can, of course, be singular and plural (especially when used in physics).

Edited 2008-05-08 17:31 UTC

It differs per language. You can either determine plurality by looking at the meaning of the word in question, or by looking at the grammatical structure of the word. For instance, it's "a number of people ARE" in English, even though the subject ("a number of people") is grammatically singular. In Dutch, you get "een aantal mensen IS" (is = is), exactly because the subject is grammatically singular.

Another fun case is the notation of percentages. In English, you say "50% of people are", while in Dutch, you say "50% van de mensen is", simply because a percentage might be plural in meaning, it's still singular grammatically. This is actually something even native Dutch speaker struggle with.

Actually, here in the UK, it is much more normal to say "Microsoft IS a large organisation", (although the "are" form is not unheard of) however, if we talk about the activities of said organisation, we might say "Microsoft ARE working on X, Y and Z". In addition these would be "their" activities.

Basically, when speaking about a collective in an abstract way, referring the the collective itself, it can be referred to as singular, since we are talking about one collective, however, when using the name of the collective as shorthand for it's members, plural is used, so "Microsoft is a large organisation", but "Microsoft are developing Windows 7".

IMHO, I am not a language expert.