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 beyond 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.”