The Grammar of English Grammars, page 590 by Gould Brown
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m> of life seemed destined to undergo."--POPE: _in Joh. Dict._ "A disjunctive syllogism is one whose major premise is disjunctive."--_Hedge's Logic_. "Where should he have this gold? It is some poor fragment, some slender ort of his remainder."--SHAK.: Timon of Athens.
OBS. 32.--There are several nouns which are usually alike in both numbers. Thus, _deer, folk, fry, gentry, grouse, hose, neat, sheep, swine, vermin_, and rest, (i. e. the rest, the others, the residue,) are regular singulars, but they are used also as plurals, and that more frequently. Again, _alms, aloes, bellows, means, news, odds, shambles_, and species, are proper plurals, but most of them are oftener construed as singulars. Folk and fry are collective nouns. Folk means _people_; _a folk, a people_: as, "The ants are a people not strong;"--"The conies are but a feeble folk."--_Prov._, xxx, 25, 26. "He laid his hands on a few sick folk, and healed them."--Mark, vi, 5. Folks, which ought to be the plural of folk, and equivalent to peoples, is now used with reference to a plurality of individuals, and the collective word seems liable to be entirely superseded by it. A fry is a swarm of young fishes, or of any other little creatures living in water: so called, perhaps, because their motions often make the surface fry. Several such swarms might properly be called _fries_; but this form can never be applied to the individuals, without interfering with the other. "So numerous was the fry."--Cowper. "The fry betake themselves to the neighbouring pools."--Quarterly Review. "You cannot think more contemptuously of these gentry than they were thought of by the true prophets."--_Watson's Apology_, p. 93. "Grouse, a heathcock."--Johnson.
"The 'squires in scorn will fly the house For better game, and look