'Yes' can be a countable noun - "I'll take that as a yes, then", so we can definitely have a plural, and don't need to resort to apostrophes (yes's). Dictionaries seem to give two possibilities - 'yesses' and 'yeses', (although I'm getting red-lined for the double s version). Personally, I prefer 'yesses' - why?

If you simply add 'es' to yes, the e could look as though it was hardening the s, so it looks as though it might sound like 'yezes'. The example of 'focus' is not the same, as the stress or accent falls on 'fo', not 'us', and 'excess' already has a double s. 'Yeses' simply looks a bit odd to me.

On the other hand, for gas, my dictionary gives 'gases' (less frequently 'gasses'), and as someone else pointed out - buses.

@Chris B - Yes, the plural of no is noes (according to two dictionaries I checked) . And I agree - 'The number of yes(s)es was higher than the number of noes'.

As far as I know, we only use plurals of yes and no like this when talking of votes, so we could avoid the whole problem by simply saying - "The yes votes easily outnumbered the no votes"

@Hairy Scot - we wouldn't normally use a present simple with 'since', so it would need to be 'I have attended X High School since I was 15', or (I think better) 'I have been attending X High School since I was 15'

Many foreign learners do in fact use the word 'attend' quite a lot, as in 'I attended a meeting yesterday'. Personally, I encourage them to say 'I went to' in ordinary conversation, as I find 'attend' rather formal. And it is marked as such in both Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary and the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, both for the 'go to a meeting sense' and the 'go regularly to' sense.

On the web, 'have been going to high school' gets' 1,320,000 hits, while 'have been attending' gets 237,000 although admittedly 'have attended high school gets 1,060,000', But this includes things like 'could have attended' and similar constructions with 'have gone to high school' get 2,890,000. Add them all up, and the 'go to' versions seem to outnumber the 'attend' versions.

Also, 'have been going to secondary school' gets 19,700 hits as opposed to 9,870 for "have been attending secondary school".

Even in books, 'went to high school' seem to have overtaken 'attended high school' round about the mid-eighties, and something similar seems to be happening in British English with 'secondary school' and 'primary school'.

http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=attended+high+school%2Cwent+to+high+school&year_start=1900&year_end=2000&corpus=17&smoothing=3&share=

Just the Word, a collocation finder based on the British National Corpus, finds 1146 incidents of 'go to school', and 376 for 'attend school'. These include all grammatical forms, and variations of school - public school, drama school, night school etc, or just plain school.

http://www.just-the-word.com/main.pl?word=school&mode=combinations

What's more, the examples with 'go' nearly all have the 'attend' meaning, rather than simply 'I went to school today':

http://www.just-the-word.com/show_examples.pl?triple=school_N+pobj_of+go_V^to_PREP

'Attend' is fine on your CV, but phrasal verbs nearly always sound more natural than their formal equivalents in conversational English - IMHO :))

@calvin mpilo - A skilful person is someone who is good at doing something, whereas a knowledgeable person is someone who knows a lot about something. Someone may be very knowledgeable about plants, for example, but not be very skilful at growing them, whereas their green-fingered neighbour might be very skilful at growing plants, although not having a great theoretical knowledge about them.

An art historian might be very knowledgeable about art but hopeless at painting; a self-taught watercolourist, on the other hand, might be a very skilful artist without ever having read a book on the subject.

The skilful person no doubt learns a lot through practice and so becomes knowledgeable about the practice of their skill (although not necessarily the theory), but there's no guarantee that a knowledgeable person is going to become similarly skilful at anything.

I answered in the spirit of the question, but actually, I don't really find any of the answers with "Five eggs is/are too many/much" all that natural. I think I'd be much more likely to say something like "Five eggs! That's far too many/much for one person!"

@roland_butter - There are also a couple of other useful websites for finding collocations etc. I've written about the here - http://random-idea-english.blogspot.com/2013/04/finding-collocations-and-language-in.html

I would say that your follow-up example is OK, "always" being an adverb of frequency, so suggesting a repeated action. And in this case, present perfect continuous would sound weird. Although I might qualify it with something like "ever since I was a youngster" or something like that. Some examples from Google Books (edited and proofread)

I have always gone to private schools
I am Catholic and I have always gone to church
I have always gone to my first meetings ... drunk or detoxing.
I have always gone to school in Hillford

And there are plenty of examples from the British National Corpus here - click on the plus sign to see them.

http://www.netspeak.org/#query=I+have+always+gone+%253F%253F

Something similar happens with present simple and continuous, but the other way round. We'd normally say "I go to such and such a university" - present simple for general fact or repeated actions. "I'm going to such and such a university" sounds as though I'm just about to leave the house, or that it's only temporary.

@Skeeter Lewis - you pipped me at the post. I hadn't seen your (rather more succinct) answer when I posted.

As you point out, the verb 'go' has two different past participles - "gone" and "been" - with 'have gone somewhere" meaning that the person is not "here" - "He's gone to the shops", "She's gone to Paris". On the other hand, as you say, "'have been somewhere" suggests a round trip: the person is now "back here" - "He's been to the shops (so we can eat)", "She's been to Paris (and brought back some souvenirs)" - it seems to me that neither of these are appropriate for your example.

Let's look at your cookery classes example. I agree that - “I have been at cookery classes since I was a child.” doesn't seem right; it sounds as though you have spent your whole time there, night and day. But I'm afraid I don't find your alternative - "I have gone to cookery classes since I was a child" any better. As Skeeter Lewis and Daniell have said, this suggests a completed action, when you are really talking about a repeated action, so perfect continuous would be most appropriate - "I've been going to cookery classes since I was a child".

One pointer may lie in "since". With "for" and "since" and "how long" (where the answer would include "for" or "since"), we usually use a perfect continuous, especially when stressing length of time:

"I've been waiting for you for ages" - "I've waited" sounds as though I've finished, "have been waiting" stresses the activity.

"How long have you been learning English?" - "Only since last year."

There are admittedly exceptions: with "live" and "work" we have a choice when we see them as state verbs -"I've lived / been living here since I changed job" - "She has been working / has worked here for twenty years now"

Then there's the complication that you are using the verb "go" to mean "attend", rather than its primary meaning of move in a certain direction. Although "has attended since" appears to be a lot more common than "has been attending since", "attend" really means "go every day", "go regularly", or some such, so when we use "go" here, we are actually talking about a repeated action, hence perfect continuous is the way to go. Here's Swan, in Practical English Usage:

"The present perfect progressive (aka continuous) focuses on the action/situation itself, looking at it as a continuous, extended activity (not necessarily finished. The simple present perfect, on the other hand, looks more at the ideas of completion and present result"

As the other two have suggested, the key appears to lie in your example being about a repeated action.

Unlike Tim33 and Jasper, I have no problem with 'five eggs is too much' - once you've broken them into a mixing bowl, we are talking about an uncountable mass, not separate eggs.

Nor do I have any problem with the switch from 'many' to 'much' for similar reasons. You can really only use 'many' to ask the question, but either is valid as an answer - 'that's too many (eggs)' or 'that's too much (mixture)'. - 'How many sugars do you take in your coffee? Four?' - 'Four! No, that's far too much.'

As for singular or plural with 'too many' after a number I think that there are many exceptions to the rule - "Because the subject is plural, the verb is plural" - depending on whether we see the plural noun as representing several units or a single entity, especially when numbers are involve.In all these examples, I'd argue that a plural verb would be incorrect:

'Five miles is a long way to walk for a young child.'
'Ten pounds is a lot to pay for what is basically a sandwich.'
'Twenty kilos is about the same weight as two buckets of water.'
'Thirty cigarettes a day was about his average.'

We are seeing the number here as a total amount, rather than individual units - in maths we'd always use singular, I think - 'Five is more than three' etc.

In fact, there seems to have been an settling in favour of number + 'is too many' since the late sixties:

http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=five+is+too+many%2Cfive+are+too+many&year_start=1900&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=

On Google 'five is too many' gets 138,000 hits, "five are too many" only 21,000.
At Google Books it's 1,960 ('is') to 644 ('are')

Netspeak, a collocation tool, which finds examples in the British National Corpus, only appears to find examples with "is" (click on the + sign to see example sentences) - http://www.netspeak.org/#query=five+%253F+too+many

So, jayles - I think 'Five eggs is too much' is fine and the most natural answer, being the way we usually talk about food. Second choice would be 'Five eggs is too many' or perhaps better - 'That's too many eggs'. And I totally agree - 'Five eggs are too many' does not sound natural English to me, nor does it seem to be used very much.

There are certainly some restrictions on adjective position. Some adjectives, like "elder, live (in the sense of living)" are only used attributively (before the noun), while others are only used predicatively (after a linking verb such as "be, seem, become" - for example "alive, awake". But you seem to have found an oddity with "chary".

I think the entry you quote from The Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage more or less says it all - "often followed by 'of' and somewhat less often by 'about' ... may occasionally be found with 'as to, in' or 'with' " - although it doesn't specifically say you can't use it attributively. I can't find anything about it in Fowler (1st or 3rd editions).

Oxford Advance Learner's Dictionary lists it as synonymous with "wary" and gives the usage "chary of something/of doing something"

Longman's says it is especially used in British English, giving the usage - "chary about/of doing something" - and the example sentence -"Banks were chary of lending the company more money."

Cambridge gives the example - "I'm a bit chary of using a travel agency that doesn't have official registration."

Some online collocation corpus-based tools might help:

Netspeak based on BNC (British National Corpus) - "chary of" - 41.6%, followed by a comma or full stop (i.e. predicative) - 25.4%, followed by "about" - 3%

http://www.netspeak.org/#query=chary%253F

Just the Word (BNC) finds only examples with "of"

http://www.just-the-word.com/main.pl?word=chary&mode=combinations

Fraze-it has plenty of examples from both British and American publications - the vast majority with "of", a few with "about",and only one that I can see being used attributively (from The Atlantic) - "Other myths circulating among my chary middle-class cohort turned out to be false." There's a link at Fraze-it.

http://fraze.it/n_search.jsp?hardm=1&t=0&l=0&p=1&q=chary

Google site searches for The Economist, The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Times and The Independent bring up predominantly examples with "of"

But the Guardian does have at least one example of it being used attributively - "Why is it that, despite America's increasingly chary approach to visitors, I feel more at home in Chelsea, Manhattan than I ever do in Chelsea, London"

As does the Independent - "Regulation-chary Chancellor George Osborne, desperate for international businesses to set up shop in Britain, bears an uncomfortable resemblance to a shopping-mall owner trying to flog off vacant lots.".

https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=chary%20site:www.economist.com
https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=chary site:www.guardian.co.uk

In its column on "Errors and Omissions", the Independent has this to say:

"Go carefully: This is from a comment piece on Monday, about Vicky Pryce and how the desire for revenge led her into danger: “Of course she made some dreadful mistakes and should have been more chary, but I recognise her pain because long ago I felt it too.”

“Chary” and “wary”, a pair of words similar in both sound and meaning, cause a great deal of trouble. “Chary” means careful, cautious or sparing in giving something out. “Wary” means habitually on one’s guard. You are chary of something desirable that you have, but wary of something you fear, as Vicky Pryce ought to have been."

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/errors-and-omissions-we-might-need-a-solemn-oath-to-save-he-and-she-from-extinction-8536220.html

But this seems to be very much their own interpretation - I can' t find anything about "giving out" anywhere else. Incidentally, 'chary' seems to be derived from the same Old English word 'cearig' that gives us 'care'.