At last, a meaningful millennial visitor

I want to be known for grammar and sailing, and at last, that’s happening

*Cue trumpet fanfare* The 24,000^th visitor to Five O’Clock Somewhere is someone from Oceanside, California, using the most common operating system and browser, in (of course) the Pacific time zone. The visitor stayed for nearly a quarter of an hour and visited three pages.

The visitor’s question: “Clocks is what part of speech?”

The answer: It depends. You have to look at the sentence that it’s in, and see how it behaves.

It could be a noun: The antique store had many lovely clocks for sale.

Or it could be a verb: The automatic timing system clocks all of the racers as they finish.

At least for this particular word, I can’t come up with any other parts of speech that it could be. … If it didn’t have the s on the end, it could be an adjective or adverb, but even then, it couldn’t be a pronoun, preposition or conjunction, and it could be an interjection only in a fictional world with its own slang: Clocks! Did you see that double-bogus hurdle-whang ticktock?