I am not an expert on the English language and have no formal qualifications English. I offer my advice as a native British English speaker. I believe the advice of an untrained English speaker can sometimes be beneficial

XD, in before on "cuts and bruises" vs "bruises and cuts", which there is a link to ngrams about that in my comment on the question. I'm not really sure why more people find it natural either -- maybe it has to do with the syllable count of the words?

@gattsbr Thanks for that link. I am not entirely sure what an Ngram is but from the link I guess it is something to do with how words are used. It might be something I look into in the future as that was one fabulous graph you linked to. Like I said, I have no formal training in English and when I was at school they nether told us about ngrams!

Basically, it shows the frequencies of phrase usage based on what's in books.

The sentence, "All he had was cuts and bruises" is common in Britain. When someone is involved in an accident but the injuries sustained are less serious than would be expected people often use this sentence even if it is not factually correct. An example. Alice: "Did you see that car drive of the cliff?". Bob: "Yes. I expect the driver is in a bad way". Alice: "No. All he had was cuts and bruises"

pins and needles vs needles and pins, bells and whistles vs whistles and bells, meat and potatoes vs potatoes and meat, milk and cookies vs cookies and milk. I'm sure there is others, but I guess how the order is determined on that might be interesting to find out.

sure, I guess I don't really have more to say than that however lol

These are all excellent examples. Maybe it is because the phrases are being understood in my brain as single words as they are used so frequently together.

Gah, link is to long, but if you go to books.google.com/ngrams and then paste in: cuts and bruises,bruises and cuts,pins and needles,needles and pins,bells and whistles,whistles and bells,meat and potatoes,potatoes and meat,milk and cookies,cookies and milk

you get a nice graph of all of them, but the first one in all of them, which is also the one we both go with, has a higher usage

but on something like: rice and beans,beans and rice

gattsbr The word order is matter of pronunciation firstly of all

Saying "cuts and bruises" is much faster and way more easier than saying "bruises and cuts"

On the topic: In the OP's example both "was" and "were" are correct, but the difference might slightly differ if you go deep into discussion. However I find it that not always can one interchange the other.

What do you mean by matter of pronunciation? What determines if it's faster and easier, or easier and faster? ;)

I found the cuts and bruises example interesting in that started out less common than bruises and cuts. Maybe we hear these phrase as children when we are learning the language ourselves and what looks like a phrase on the page is actually understood as a single word. Changing the order of the words breaks that phrase back into single words again.

@SovereignSun Thank you for your input. It is always welcome. I am really intending this chat to be about the word order in common phrases. If you would like to comment about the original question's use of was and where it may be better to add it to the original question or start a separate chat.

The syllable count in 'cuts and bruises' and 'bruises and cuts' is the same. It may be quicker to say 'cuts and bruises' because we are more used to saying it. I think therefore that saying we use 'cuts and bruises' because it is quicker leads to a circular argument somewhere.

same for everything else in that list.

but then there is rice and beans, or beans and rice.

But yeah, I'm biased to the popular order of those as well, based on what I've always heard said too.

So far I've found en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleonasm#Professional_and_scholarly_use which really doesn't seem to give any insight, other than to the term 'doublets', but that's in reference to something which is the same, such as null and void