In the Whole Town, There (Is/Are) Two Good Restaurants; or, Why is Everyone Saying “There Is”?

Long, long ago, when English faculty used to meet their students in actual classrooms on actual campuses, when we used to know what our students looked like (instead of seldom seeing anything other than the mostly silent little black boxes I’m confronted with in the online classroom); back in the days when students had to buy hard-copy textbooks that had real pages (remember those?), I often had students in my English class do a grammar exercise from the book on subject-verb-agreement. One question that stood out was the following: 

In the whole town, there (is/are) two good restaurants. 

I recall this question because, unlike the others, it was ridiculously easy. When I went over the answers, the entire class responded in unison: “Are.”

            “Why?”

            “Restaurants,” they all replied, as if that explained everything—and it did. It was obvious and straightforward; no explanation was necessary. That such an easy question was even included in the book was a touch embarrassing.

            Not so today. More recently, I did the exercise again in one of my online classes (I’ve since scanned the page from the book and uploaded it as a PDF onto the “learning platform”), and this time the answer was neither quick nor even unanimous.

            “Is?” a few disembodied voices trepidatiously ventured, while the rest remained silent.

I wasn’t surprised as much as troubled by this noticeable shift in grammar that has taken place over the last few years and the evident lack of confidence in delivering the answer this examples illustrates, because it’s an error I hear all the time now. Every day—and I do mean every single day—I hear it. In ordinary, daily conversations, on the podcasts I listen to, in the reports delivered by journalists and the people they interview, in the speeches given by our politicians, even by other faculty who teach English: it’s everywhere, and almost everyone is doing it. In the past few days, here are just some examples I heard:  

“There’s folks from…”

“There’s guides to…”

“There’s 16 or 17 left…”

“There’s audio samplers…”

“There’s tons of examples.”

“There was kids crying…”

“There’s been times when…”

“There’s two reasons…”

“There was no more bookings.”

“There was times when I cried.”

“There is a couple of reasons…”

“There’s people who say…”

“If there’s any characters in this novel, and there is…”

“There’s more opportunities than ever.”

“There’s millions of different things.”

“There’s just lots of things.”

“I’ll stop right here to see if there’s any questions.”

The list could go on and on, except I need to add a variant that I don’t hear nearly as often but it involves the same grammar: “Here is two reasons.”

When used in the present tense, it’s a subtle error, hardly noticeable even. The apostrophe-S practically elides the verb, making the solecism almost inaudible. Did you say “there is” or “there are”? I often think, but then I lose the point the speaker was making. And given how subtle the error is, it’s almost—almost—forgivable. On some Reddit forums, some have explained that it’s easier to say “there’s” than it is to say “there are” or “there’re.” Fair enough. But what sounds much more clunky and, frankly, illiterate is when the past tense is used incorrectly: “There was six men in Montreal…”; “There was kids crying”; “There was no more beds.”

Doesn’t that sound funny to you? I want to say, and again I’ve lost track of what the speaker was saying.

The education level of the speaker doesn’t seem to matter either, nor his or her nationality, age, or any other factor: pretty much everyone is doing it now. Even someone as articulate as Will Self, whose arcane word choices I often approve of, except for his habit of slipping into pompousness, wrote, “There is absolutely masses” in his essay “Ithica” for the November 2024 issue of Harper’s. Was this deliberate? How could such an obvious grammar error slip past the editors?

What makes all this frustrating is my own helplessness. Except in a classroom environment, where it is my duty to correct (ineffectually, I know), the social proscription on correcting other people’s grammar, not to mention the time and space gap between audience and speaker inherent in electronic media, forces me to silently endure it—like nails on a chalkboard. Only my inner voice protests: There are… There are…!

What’s more frustrating still is that I catch myself doing it too. I’ve heard myself saying things like, “There’s leaves on the trees” and “There’s chocolates,” and I understood I wasn’t immune to the infectious quality of language. And it troubles me, not only because this kind of basic subject-verb-agreement error is not something I would have made a few years, but also because there seems to be so little discussion of what really is in fact an enormous shift in grammar, as subtle as it may seem. Yet few seem to even notice; fewer still seem to care. 

The Grammar:

So, is it correct to say, “There is”?

Yes—but only if the subject (the noun, the thing we’re talking about, the focus of the sentence) that follows the verb is singular.

·      “There’s a book I want to read.”

·      “There’s information on the website.”

·      “There’s still time.”

All of these are correct because the things we are talking about (book, information, time) are singular. “There’s leftovers in the fridge,” on the other hand, is wrong because leftovers are plural. It’s not my purpose here to get into all the variations and exceptions, but the subject generally comes before the verb in English (“The children are singing”; “The soldiers stand at attention”; “The doctor sees patients in the mornings”). However, when it comes to here and there, the order is inverted: the subject comes after the verb; but to determine the correct verb form (is, are, was, were), the speaker needs to know in advance what that subject will be. The words there and here, in other words, are never the subject. They are called “expletives” (or, as I read somewhere, “dummy subjects”); yet many people, whether they know it or not, have begun to use there and here as if they were the subject, one that is always singular.

“There are chocolates,” is what I should have said because the noun (chocolates) is plural.

This is not some arbitrary or pedantic grammar rule because, after all, if one were to invert the sentence, it would now obviously be incorrect to say, “The chocolates is on the table.” In both cases the correct form of the verb is “are” because, again, what we are talking about—the subject—is chocolates.

“I’ll stop to see if there are any questions” is what the speaker of this sentence should have said because the subject is the word questions, which are plural.

“If there are any characters in this novel, and there are…” is the correct version of this sentence. Here the subject is the word characters.

One thing to keep in mind is that if the words that follow there or here include many, few, fewer, or numbers larger than 1, the subject will be plural:

·      There are many reasons not to do that.

·      There are a few people here.

·      There are 16 or 17 left.

What about in a sentence like this? “Here is the host and his wife.” In this case, the subject includes two nouns (a compound subject): the host and wife. Just as the above example illustrates, inverting the sentence will reveal the answer: “The host and his wife are here.” Therefore, the correct response is: “Here are the host and his wife.”

But as often happens in English, exceptions, caveats, and other complications abound, and one thing that likely causes confusion is the phrase “a lot” or “a bunch of.” Do you say “There is” or “There are” when followed by the phrase “a lot” or “a bunch of”? A lot is a noun, so is a bunch, each must be singular, no? Here, too, the answer depends on the noun that follows a lot.

“There is a lot of time” is correct because time is singular.

“There are a lot of calories in that” is correct because calories are plural.

“There are a bunch of racoons on the roof” is correct because racoons are plural.

“There is a lot of homework” is correct because homework is a non-countable noun, and so it is treated as singular.

But who knows these things? Does anyone even care? If we are not taught grammar in elementary school (and in Ontario grammar hasn’t been taught in any real capacity for the last 50 years; I certainly was never taught grammar in school); if we are not actively reading; and if we are not actively writing and not always giving in to the temptation of auto-fill, auto-correct, or even outsourcing the task to AI, how will we ever know how to speak clearly, correctly, and intelligently?

Why This Matters

I can already hear the argument: “But language changes.” And: “So what if people are saying ‘there is’ instead of ‘there are.’ Who cares? Does it really matter?” Which is usually followed by the worst of arguments: “I know what the person means.”

I find these arguments both frustrating and disconcerting, for what they really convey, more than anything else, is sheer indifference to these changes; that correct usage, effective communication, and precision, are secondary to the “content” that is delivered to the recipient, like data to be downloaded from one device to another. The “language-changes” proponents seem to be suggesting that good style, attention to detail and, not least important, eloquence, don’t matter. And although the issue of there is/are may appear to be a relatively minor issue, it situates itself within something much more substantial concern: basic subject-verb agreement, the most fundamental aspect of English grammar. (The very noticeable degradation of subject-verb agreement, both in speech and writing over the last several years, is an enormous topic outside the scope of this essay.) And so, when people say “language changes,” I suspect that they are really advocating to give themselves permission for sloppiness; and when sloppiness becomes widespread, I worry about the effect this will have—is having—culturally on our own ability to clearly articulate our thoughts without having to second-guess our verbal choices or having to rely on technological assistance. I see it not only in my students, but I see it in myself, and no doubt this essay has its own share of grammatical errors.

The other problem is the excessiveness that there’s has now acquired. No longer just an occasional speech error, it has become increasingly common to not just start sentences with there’s but to even to use it multiple times in a single sentence. “There is a system and there’s laws,” I heard in a recent radio interview: a sloppy, grammatically incorrect, and meaningless sentence. Or this: “There’s people like that. There’s some people who will say that, and there’s some who won’t.” Or worse still: “Because there’s wildfires, there’s going to be people in need.” All these cases illustrate both bad grammar and bad style, and the excessiveness of there’s rivals that of those other bugbears of the English language: honestly and literally. In the latest edition of Garner’s Modern English Usage, Bryan A. Garner notes that “there is” and “there are” have been historically widely shunned. Quoting earlier writers on the matter, Garner explains that these phrases “can also be the enemies of a lean writing style,” for they “shove the really significant verb into subordinate place instead of letting it stand vigorously on its own feet.” For Garner, the only defensible usage of there is/are is when the “writer is addressing the existence of something. That is, if the only real recourse is to use the verb exist, then there is is perfectly fine.”

Why Is Everyone Saying "100%"?

Decades ago, when I lived in Montreal to do my master’s, I didn’t bother learning French. I thought I’d just “pick it up,” naturally, effortlessly. “Through osmosis,” I half-joked. It didn’t work out. I never learned any French—except for one thing, the phrase ché pas, Quebec slang for “I don’t know,” which I heard everywhere and used it frequently myself.

Picking up such words and idioms is, of course, central to the way in which language works. William Burroughs once wrote that “language is a virus,” and he was right: words and phrases seem to float in the air; they get picked up and passed around, and sometimes they become fashionable for a time before they fade away again (think of such old-timey phrases as how d’ you do?, groovy, dig that now make one cringe); or, sometimes they become cemented into the structure of language (like the post-1960s way in which the word hopefully is now used, or the acceptance of the split-infinitive—“to boldly go where no man has gone before”—or, more recently, the general acceptance of the singular they). When I returned to Canada in 2006 after living in South Korea for nine years, I was perplexed by the strange popularity of the phrase Wait for it. Where did it come from? And why was everyone saying it? (I’ve since learned the answer.) It was around that time that the word dude also became popular. For years, it was a word I reviled. It was too young for me, too “slang-y” and illiterate-sounding, and so at odds with how I spoke until, one day, maybe ten or so years later, it suddenly wasn’t, and I adopted it as my own (usually as a slightly patronizing but lighthearted jab, as in, “Dude, what are you doing?”).

More recent examples of fashionable words and phrases include that inane portmanteau oftentimes, the endlessly repeated phrase talks about (you need to be an English teacher who marks essays for a living or a listener of podcasts to recognize the incessant repetition of this phrase), and the Tweedle-dee and Tweedledum of language: literally, honestly, and their offspring: To tell you the truth and I’m not gonna lie. Discussion of literally and honestly deserves its own blog post, and I’ll save that for next time. What I wish to focus on here, however, is the brand new and sudden rise of the phrase 100%.

The first time I heard it a few weeks ago I immediately fell in love with it. When I asked my property manager if something in my unit was going to get fixed, he replied “100%.” When I asked a store clerk if it was still possible to get a refund on a used item, he too replied, “100%.” And when I pushed back a rental car reservation and asked the agent on the phone if I would still be guaranteed a car at that hour, she too dispelled my fears by that simple answer: “100%.” The first few times I heard it, I thought it was highly original and therefore—to use Merriam-Webster’s 2023 Word of the Year—authentic. Above all, I loved the absolute and total assurance conveyed by this simple response. It was effectively a promise or, even better, a money-back guarantee! And in an era that’s short on trust in our institutions, 100% signalled that not only could you trust the speaker, but that the speaker was wholly on your side and that your request or favour or proposition wasn’t in the least unreasonable or stupid. It was as if you had unwittingly taken a test—a pop quiz—and not only had you passed it, but in fact you scored perfect! And who doesn’t like 100%? I hesitate to admit (I won’t say honestly) that I even felt a little burst of affection for those first few speakers who said it to me, a little dopamine rush that, I understood, was not unlike a thumbs-up emoji: something that makes you feel good at the moment, especially if a sizable number is next to it.

*

But after a few weeks, the novelty wore off and I already grew weary of 100%. In that short span of time, I’d gone from wholehearted approbation to disillusionment, and I imagine that it won’t be long before it too will go the way of literally and honestly: phatic verbal reflexes that not only say little but, like so much else of what we encounter today, is of dubious sincerity and little more the auto-fill of speech. Far from a sign of originality, this phrase is really a reflection of the broader culture and the degree to which technology plays in our lives and its role in influencing our thought and speech.

By definition, 100% is an answer that rules out all other possibilities; indeed, that the response is 100% and not 99% emphasizes much more emphatically that there is no wiggle-room for nuance, subtlety, complexity, exception, or compromise than a simple yes or no answer might convey. What it offers is an all-or-nothing or zero-sum response that is not unlike the way much of contemporary thought, and political discourse in particular, has been both characterized and criticized. It is a reflection, in other words, of our cultural tendency—spurred on by the way in which social media categorizes, separates, and polarizes people and ideas—to interpret and respond to the world in an increasingly simplistic, increasingly dichotomous, even Manichean way: good/bad, friend/enemy, thumbs-up/thumbs-down, blue/red, oppressor/oppressed. In a technologically dominated world that suffers from shortened attention spans and eschews complexity and difficulty but valorizes brevity, convenience, efficiency, and “plain-and-simple English,” the message that 100% conveys is reassuringly short and simple: there is no ambiguity.

That a reply to a yes/no question should take the form of not just a number but a percentage also seems to underscore the extent to which numbers—data—play in the way we perceive the world around us. Nearly every aspect of our lives—the algorithms that keep track of us; our preoccupation with the number of likes, followers, friends, downloads, views, and shares on social media; the number of stars we assign to almost every transaction or service we encounter; the grades that students value more highly than what they learn; our obsession with tracking the minutiae of every aspect of our health; the endless stats and polls that fill the news; not to mention the financial and economic numbers we all fret over—has become increasingly dominated by a veritable spreadsheet of numerical figures that preoccupy our thinking, tell us what is good and determine how we should think and act.

As Walter Ong has argued, our tools shape our consciousness, so it’s not surprising, therefore, that our speech should be influenced in this way. One hundred percent is a good number. It’s like the very building blocks of computer language with its infinitesimal combination of one’s and zero’s; and 100% is the simplest of codes: one-zero-zero. The irony, however, is that as computers “learn” to speak like humans, we are learning to speak like computers; and in our technologically driven world, 100% means your computer is fully updated and protected against all viruses and malware; 100% means an app has completely downloaded and is ready to use; 100% means that your phone battery is fully charged and you can confidently go through your day without worry. One hundred percent is the score the speaker rated your request, favour, or idea and thereby suggests that a number is a better substitute for and communicates more clearly than words. We are, in short, talking like our machines, and it’s a response that would have been incomprehensible in an earlier decade or century.

So what are the words that this phrase has supplanted? “Absolutely,” “Oh yeah, for sure,” “Without a doubt,” “No question,” “Certainly,” “Of course,” “Don’t worry”—plus any number of other phrases unique to a particular context. Perhaps some of these expressions have lost their credibility; perhaps we have come to doubt their value or earnestness the way many of us have grown to distrust much of what we hear. Or perhaps it’s a reflection of a culture that is constantly texting and tapping on keys: just as thumbing out full words and sentences on one’s phone or hitting the shift key is annoying and time consuming, speaking actual words and full sentences has similarly become just as troublesome and mentally taxing. (It’s one of the great ironies that with every increase in convenience brought about by some technological advancement, whatever labour remains is regarded as intolerably vexing.) Numbers, though, are both more reliable and instantaneous. As writers like Jacque Ellul and Neil Postman have described, modernity has given way to a world that values efficiency above all else, sees technical calculation as superior to human judgment, regards subjectivity is an obstacle, and considers what can’t be measured as non-existent or a pseudo-problem.

Although it may appear as though I’m making far too much of this seemingly benign little phrase that has become popular recently, I see the prevalence of words like 100%, literally, and honestly as emblematic of a larger societal shift toward an increasingly simplistic, grammatically impoverished use of English that instead of freeing up expression only makes us more limited in our ability to articulate ourselves; and given the role that AI has begun to play in many of our lives with its ability to produce text that is, at once, far more sophisticated than what I’d ordinarily see from the average college student yet also extraordinarily banal, flat, and hollow-sounding, I expect our language will continue to change in strange and unexpected ways. It’s something I’d like to explore in other posts.

Technology is Not a Thing but a Mindset

For Heidegger, the essence of technology has nothing to do with the technological. For him, technology is a mindset, a way of looking at the world as “standing reserve,” a stock of exploitable resources. He calls this mindset “enframing,” and it’s something that has encompassed everything. A river, for instance, reveals itself as a power supplier; a tract of land “reveals itself as a coal mining district, the soil as a mineral deposit” (p. 14). Enframing has even encapsulated man (we are, after all, in the eyes of Big Tech the sum of our data). And now, as demonstrated by the advent of ChatGPT, enframing has swallowed up language, turning it from something uniquely human into a large-language model and a complex series of statistical outcomes.

Others have put forth similar ideas: There’s Marshall McLuhan’s famous dictum: “The medium is the message” and Walter Ong’s, “Technologies are not mere exterior aids but also interior transformations of consciousness.” Or, as Caitlyn Flanagan (2021) simply put it in a piece for The Atlantic, “Twitter didn’t live in the phone. It lived in me.”

What, then, is the mindset that governs our word-processing technology? For one thing, that spelling, punctuation, and grammar no longer matter. Ask any student and you will discover that in the medium of texting, the idea of proper capitalization, punctuation, and even proper spacing are frowned upon, even regarded as prissy and pretentious (though these are not the words they used). A period, I’m told, is seen as “aggressive” or a display of anger. It comes as no surprise, then, that this mindset is reflected in the lockdown browser quiz environment, or in the hand-written work of many of our students: work in which everything is in lower-case, including the first-person pronoun; apostrophes that are nowhere to be found; strange, idiosyncratic spacing choices before and after punctuation; and lines that begin with a comma or period. And let’s not even get into the issues of grammar and spelling. (Even my own spelling, I’m forced to confront week after week when standing at the whiteboard, has atrophied as a result of auto-correct.)

Is this simply laziness or do the students really not know the rules?

The answer, of course, is both. In a world in which hitting the shift key or space bar is too much effort, and our reliance on auto-correct, auto-fill, Grammarly, and now AI, have come to dominate, the technological mindset that Heidegger identified means that there is no real incentive to even know the rules in the first place, that little in fact needs to be remembered or internalized, carelessness is the norm, attention to detail is no longer valued, and independent thought can now be outsourced to technology whose vast sweep has beguiled all of us to varying degrees. If technology is a mindset, it means that a kind of somnambulance governs the classroom, and English class in particular: one need not pay attention (or even attend) if online classes are recorded, which can later be watched and rewatched at 1.25 speed, skipping all the “boring bits.” Note-taking, too, has become obsolete because PowerPoint slides and videos are posted in the course shell, and, more recently, so are AI-generated summaries of the lesson are now available for online classes. And if notes are required, students will often take photos of the whiteboard or screenshots in an online class. Even the idea of writing by hand has become alien, not just to our students but for many teachers as well. (Although many other issues are at play here, one thing is certain: when we abandoned the teaching of cursive, we did so because we believed it no longer served a practical purpose; but what we didn’t realize was that it specifically taught those things that are currently lacking: attention to detail, the importance of rules (and their internalization through frequent repetition), the appreciation of beauty, and to strive for it. It taught us that even the physical act of writing—the tangible feel of it—can be a joy.)

We call all our so-called technological advancements “convenience” and delude ourselves into believing this is “progress,” yet we fail to realize that the tyranny of convenience has a corrosive effect, for we do not seem to realize that in making things easier and more convenient we also do away with motivation. In fact, the technological mindset only instills the idea that reading and writing are tedious, difficult, and boring. But as well all know, there needs to be a degree of difficulty, of pain—of failure—without which there can be no learning and ultimately no reward. No pain, no gain, as they say. After all, anything worth doing or having must be difficult to achieve, and essay writing is supposed to be difficult. But if the very basics haven’t been learned and internalized, if remembering anything is too onerous and overwhelming, all learning will only become increasingly difficult, not less; and what gets taught in the classroom will necessarily have to become more and more remedial—“dumbed down,” as it were. This is not speculation; this is happening now.

But there is another, more insidious, effect: when even language itself has become subject to enframing and reduced to something that can be mobilized via AI to answer the most esoteric prompt in the form of a well-written essay in a matter of seconds, language itself becomes cheapened and our curiosity is deadened. This is the real danger. When all reading and writing become difficult and boring, who will want to explore the great works of the past? Who will even know of them or be interested enough to read them, be inspired by them, and driven to write or think about them? Who will be excited by books or take pleasure in their ideas? If technology is not a thing but a mindset, that mindset has increasingly been characterized by apathy and indolence. And if the most recent PISA report—in which student scores in literacy, math, and science have, for the first time ever, shown an “ ‘unprecedented drop in performance’ globally”—is any indication, it’s that we stand on the brink of a worrying trend, one in which literacy and the concentration it demands will cease to taken for granted, as it is now, but will become a highly valued skill that, just like in the Middle Ages, might once again be held in the hands of a small group of highly trained individuals.

My Novella "Massive" Is Now Available Online

I’m thrilled to share with you that my novella, “Massive” is out now on The Write Launch. Again, thanks to those who read earlier drafts of the story and helped me shape it into what it is today, and of course thanks to Sandra and Justine Fluck who accepted the story. You can find the link to the story here.

Novella Acceptance!

I’m thrilled to share some good news that my novella “Massive” has been accepted for publication at The Write Launch. It’s the longest piece I’ve written thus far—19,000 words—and I’m really happy to have found a home for this story. Thanks to Sandra and Justine Fluck for accepting this piece, and to all those who provided me feedback on the earlier drafts, most especially to Isabel Matwawana.

My Story "Queen of the Heap" is Out Now in The Nashwaak Review

I’m excited to announce that my story “Queen of the Heap” is out now in the latest issue (Volume 44/45) of The Nashwaak Review. Thanks to Stewart Donovan and Barb Haines for accepting this story.