In an earlier post called Americans’ Grammar Is Deteriorating, But Let’s Keep Things in Perspective, I made the point that many of Americans’ grammatical errors have become normalized as our respect for our traditional English language has deteriorated, just like so many other aspects of our culture.
Some of these errors are more egregious than others, of course. Still unacceptable are sentences like “Roads is made of concrete,” and “Jim and I is friends.” Both violate the rule that the subject and the verb in a sentence must agree.
Yet, in the last ten years, we’ve accepted something akin to this, which we now hear constantly. e.g.: “There’s several ways to proceed from here.” “There’s” is a contraction for “there is,” and the verb ‘is” is singular, so the correct form here would be “There are several ways ,,,”
FWIW, when I was in fifth grade in 1965, it was made quite clear to my classmates and me that no one making mistakes of this order would be promoted to sixth grade, regardless of how many times he had repeated fifth grade. We all wondered if we were sitting among one of more of our hapless fellows who would occupy these seats many years later with grayish beards, collecting monthly Social Security checks, still trying to write simple sentences.
Of course, no one in today’s school system has anything like this to fear. We happily graduate kids from high school who couldn’t tell you where Wisconsin is.
Things have changed.
