If I heard it, I would know that the speaker was not a native speaker of English.'How was thing?' is not a question I have ever heard before.
I remember one day I came across "How was thing?" I don’t know if it is natural in English? Sorry for not being able to supply you context, but I am sure it was written in that way.
If I heard it, I would know that the speaker was not a native speaker of English.
(Unless my daughter were asking me about my recent meeting with the man who ran off with my wife. But then it would be written: "How was Thing?", 'Thing' being the name we have given this gentleman.)
It's my age. I still use the subjunctive.If I may cut in: why do you used 'were"?
It's my age. I still use the subjunctive.
Many native speakers of BrE would use 'was' there.
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.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)
:up: 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.How are things? is natural.