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I came out, Ma’am, prepared to submit to everything—to be put upon in every way—but there are some things, Ma’am, one can’t submit to. There is caps, Ma’am, that suits one face and some that suits another’s, and if I’d known, Ma’am, about the caps, great as was my desire to come out to nurse at Scutari, I wouldn’t have come, Ma’am.

I found this from Florence Nightingale's letter.

If "caps" mean a kind of a hat here, in what usage does caps used with singular be a verb, "is"

Seulgi So
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  • English usage generally respects agreement of number (singular or plural) between subject and verb. But "There is" (or its contracted form There's) is a special case --- the singular verb is sometimes used even with a plural noun. Hence this older Q deals with the current Q. – Rosie F Aug 19 '21 at 05:48

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There is much discussion in other questions, referenced in @Rosie F’s comment, about the subject-verb agreement in sentences beginning with “There is.”

But “There is caps that suits . . .” is also a question of the agreement between “caps” and “suits,” which is clearly ungrammatical.

Florence Nightingale is quoting someone she presents here as speaking uneducated English. Whether she is inventing the details of this dialog we don’t know. I also don’t know whether this kind of phrasing was, in the mid-19th century, typical of uneducated women in Britain, or perhaps of Cockney dialect.

Xanne
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