Grammar enthusiast Tice Swackhamer has a theory on how society changes language, and a call to action to save the word “are.”
I am not a grammarian, although I couldn’t ignore the times when my young children and their friends began sentences with “Me and my friend…” We smothered that habit with a grammar jar that required a $1 deposit for each offense. Now, our precious verb “are” is under attack and in danger of extinction. Every day, multiple times a day, I hear sentences like this: “There’s very few cases in this country,” and “There’s too many different programs,” or the past tense version “His immediate words to our team was…”
If you don’t recognize what’s wrong with those sentences, you are not alone. In fact, the mistake is so prevalent that these examples come from some of our most reliable sources: the media. Yes, I’m talking about news anchors and broadcasters, and the experts who appear on their shows.
So, here’s the deal. Instead of saying “there is” we use the contraction “there’s,” which is correct when followed by a singular noun, as in “there’s a book on the shelf.” But when there is more than one book on the shelf, people get into trouble and either don’t know it or fail to correct it. “There are three books on the shelf” mistakenly turns into “there’s three books on the shelf.” That probably sounds right to you because you hear it all the time. The correct contraction would be “there’re,” which sounds more like a thirsty pirate than proper English, so thankfully no one says that.
I have a theory on the demise of “are.” We’ve become a short-cut society, filled with textspeak and work acronyms. In our eagerness to move faster, use fewer syllables, we’ve adopted “there’s” as a catch-all for “there is” and “there are.”