For the Insider
Way back in 2010 this sentence appeared in the Insider itself: “There’s some talented people running around the city.” Two years later, I had amassed a good-sized collection of the use of there’s instead of the correct plural there are, and I devoted a column to the issue, with examples from Tom Brady, Executive Councilor Chris Sununu, Alex Trebeck, Senator Kelly Ayotte, CNN reporter Soledad O’Brien and golfer Steve Stricker.
And they keep coming. In the last 10 days, I noticed Paul Ryan, John McCain and Hillary Clinton in the Monitor and New York Times saying, for example, “There’s always wounds in spirited political campaigns.”
The nearly ubiquitous misuse of this form still irritates me, but I recognize a losing battle when it’s this obvious.
Recently, however, something more alarming has been happening. The error with there’s seems to be polluting the use of other verbs. Here are some examples of what I mean, all heard on NPR while driving around town running errands.
A doctor interviewed for a story about safety issues in girls’ lacrosse said, “They decided that helmets is better. . . .” A local news announcer reporting on problems with the water supply in Merrimack and Litchfield told us that “traces of the dangerous chemical has been found . . . .” A national reporter prefaced a list of statements by Donald Trump with the words “The things he has said is that. . . .”
A well-educated physician and people being paid to compose and read news stories probably know that they should have said “helmets are better,” (or “the use of helmets is better” or “wearing helmets is better,” as well as “traces have been found,” and “the things that he said are.”
But they didn’t, so this error too will spread, until it is no longer an error but a generally accepted simplification of the language.
Listen for it, folks. I predict that you will hear it repeatedly.
