"well" or "good"

[SoothingDave]

And more quickly.

[5jj]

Many Americans -- you know, those lawless idiots who insist on perverting the language away from the way British people (you know, the people who invented it)

The best thing we ever did was to cast you hooligans aside before you perverted our sacred British purity too much. You cast aside our (present) perfect ways, dishonoured or theatres, drove cars on our pavements and trains through our subways, uncovered our pants and shorts, sniggered when we knocked up our sisters, stopped smoking our fags, changed the shape of our football and made our hockey slithery. And, despite the false claims of 'progressive' America, you have clung in a luddite manner to whoms and gottens, to subjunctives and excessive commas, when we have moved boldly forwards.

If it wasn't (!) for the fact that you invented that most sublime of art forms, the western, I should refuse to acknowledge your existence.

[Barb_D]

Yippie-ki-yay!

[bagzi94]

I would blush if I was an American.

[BobK]

How are things? is natural.

So it's conceivable that the singular was the written context OD thinks s/he remembers, if the writer was joking - and referring to the one thing (whatever that was) that was on everyone's mind. But it's certainly not idiomatic.

b