Holy shit. I was gonna sleep in this morning but Planet Earth had other ideas. A magnitude 7.0 quake centered pretty much on my goddamn apartment woke me up some minutes before 9am. The room started shaking violently, to the point where I leapt from my bedding and dove for the doorframe. The shaking continued for about 30 seconds.

During the quake, several pieces of furniture pretty much moved away from the wall on their own. Two mugs fell from the shelves and shattered on the floor, my 50 pound CRT walked itself about a foot across my desk, the microwave nearly fell from the top of the refrigerator, and my motorcycle, which was on its stand, completely fell over.

The plural form in English is very difficult for many language students to master, especially if their native language has no plural form. Most of the time it just sounds wrong, but plurals have some very subtle connotations that can change the meaning of a sentence substantially. Read the following sample sentences:

I like dogs.
I like dog.

The first is a statement about pet preference, and the second about your choice of cuisine. Sometimes the difference is more subtle:

Hamburger is enjoyed by many people.
Hamburgers are enjoyed by many people.

In this case it works, because “hamburger” is both a type of meat and a discrete countable food item. But usually it doesn’t work:

Is pen used in outer space?
Are pens used in outer space?

The second sentence uses the plural form to express generality; a “pen” is a generic type of object which may or may not be used in space. But the first sentence doesn’t use a plural, so when a native speaker reads the first sentence a specifier is required. Which pen? This pen? Your pen? The sentence as written is incorrect because that information is missing.

The complicated part is that some objects are discrete and countable, while others are not. This leads to much confusion. “Sushi” for some reason is not countable. Neither is “money”– but you can count “dollars”. “Rice” isn’t discrete, but we can count “grains of rice”. Animals are countable, but the meat product derived from them is not. Liquids are not countable, but containers and measurements of them are (and we go to great lengths to make plurals like “bottles of soda” or “gallons of gasoline”). Water of course isn’t countable, but the waters of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers combine to flow into the Gulf of Mexico. Quite confusing, isn’t it?