We eat with our mouth or mouths

Question

I apologized if that's been asked before, but this is hard to research.

If you were talking to a child to explain what the mouth is for, what would be the correct sentence?

We eat with our mouth

We eat with our mouths

Since "we" is plural I think it could be mouths but we also only have one mouth each.

Related previous questions: “They're using a cell phone” vs. “They're using cell phones”, “They shook their heads” or “They shook their head”?, “On their back” or “on their backs”? — herisson, Nov 28 '18 at 01:59
Thanks. I couldn't find anything since I was missing the name of this construction, the "distributed plural". — Xavier, Nov 28 '18 at 07:17

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Nov 27 '18 at 19:55

"We" is plural. A total of multiple people has a total of multiple mouths, so they eat with their mouths. "We eat with our mouth" technically means that multiple people are all eating with the same mouth.

If you want to get more complicated, "we eat with our mouth" could be correct (especially if you're looking at an older text) because "we" used to be more usable as a more general term. For example, think of the sentence:

"You use forks to eat."

Because people don't use multiple forks to eat, you can use context clues to figure out that the word "you" is being used more generally - as in:

"People use forks to eat."

In this case, it's totally acceptable to use a singular word ("you") to represent a plural case ("people use forks"). Similarly, the plural word "we" could be used in a singular sense:

"We use a fork to eat."

But that's only if you're referring to a much older text. It's hardly used anymore. Thus, you would say: "We eat with our mouths."

We eat with our mouth or mouths

1 Answers1