I know this is unrelated to the question, but I lived in Maine for 15 years. In fact, my friend owned an art gallery in Brunswick. (Speaking of Maine artists.) Is the Great Impasta still there? Are the garlic knots still as good?

I would say "I need a room for the night." Actually, I would say "Do you have a room for one night?" if I were standing in the hotel lobby. They would understand I meant this night, tonight.

That too - but he was an evil man who sought to divide rational people from one another.

I found CJ's "number transparency" post a really good one for those "One-third of... " and "Fifty percent of..." questions. You do need to unlearn the rule about making the verb agree with the closest noun.

You cannot italicize and you cannot underline? Then and only then, go ahead and use the quotation marks. Don't use the colon.

Did he refer you to those people? Or did he refer those people to you?

Don't worry - the number of people (native speakers) who say "If I was" instead of "If I were" is very high. If you said "It's the subjunctive, so you need 'were'" they would look at you as if you had

I think the area of confusion, or "doubts" if you will, exists in situations where a "quantifier" is used in front of a plural noun. Correct me if I am wrong. Fifty percent - is a unit of something, and it's generally

dimsum, your examples don't apply. Fifty percent of something plural is still plural. One-third of something plural is still plural. Anon, the subject of entire sentence is Google docs, but it's not the subject of the clause we are

Simply editing your version: If it were up to me to decide which hotel to stay in, it would have been the one we examined first. I can't tell you why, but I would never say "it'd have been" but rather "it