qwed117 wrote:I'd avoid prescriptivist standards, and instead, I would go with the most freely flowing speech. Most style books dictate saying "It is I" instead of "It's me". And if it comes from Strunk and White (only), then you can gladly ignore it: it's based in 1920s philosophy instead of linguistics.
This.
Also, how can "none" be said to be logically singular if it refers to a quantity of zero things rather than one thing? We use plural nouns after the word "zero" and after quantities like "one and a half". We frequently use either singular or plural to talk about zero of something "no person", "no people". And as I see it, "none" is the pronoun form of the determiner "no", just like how "mine" is the pronoun form of the determiner "my" - both can stand for a singular or plural noun.
- My dog is bigger. > Your dog is big, but mine is bigger.
- My dogs are bigger. > Your dogs are big, but mine are bigger.
- There is no water on Mars. > There is plenty of water on Earth, but there is none on Mars.
- There are no people on Mars. > There are plenty of people on Earth, but there
is are none on Mars.
Honestly, as a native speaker of English, my internal grammar says using "is" in the last sentence is just dead wrong* and if a style guide says "none" must ALWAYS be used with singular verbs, it's simply out of touch.
* unless doing the very informal switch from "there are" to "there's" which I'm sure the writers of those style guides would be frothing at the mouth over anyway.