I’ll put it back where it belongs.
Interesting. Why is the plural “paikoilleen” used? (and not paikalleen).
After all, it’s “sen” and not “ne”.
Wiktionary says they are synonyms. Is this some kind of fossilized form where people don’t see it as plural anymore?
All the examples on wiktionary are plural: “työkalut”, “vatteet”, “Laita tavarasi paikoilleen”.
I think this a manifestation of the Finnish tendency to prefer the plural over the singular. That said, there are also a few examples of paikalleen in the corpus.
Is this a puhekieli thing?
Also, I’ve noticed quite often sentences where a plural pronoun is used together with a singular verb (e.g. “missä ne on?”). And other sentences where there was a mismatch in numbers.
It seems that many set expressions are in the plural, and then there are words like kasvot, häät, aivot, which don’t exist in the singular.
That’s definitely a puhekieli thing, but I believe it’s another matter.