Third Person Plural of the Verb "To Be"

[Paul Anthony]

What is happening to the verb conjugation, "are"? Every time I hear people speak it's "is" this and "is" that instead of correctly saying, "are". Example: "There is three things I don't like when..." or, "There's three things I don't like when..." ("there's"--the contraction of "there is"). I hear newscasters, professors, and other teachers, most everyone speak like this. Why? Was it always like this and I am just noticing it now? You would never write like this, would you?

 

[Alizerine]

Maybe they are thinking "There is a group of three things..."and then leaving out the group. I don't know but I don't like it either.

 

[Devi]

When speaking re the plural, I'd say "there're several".

I wonder if some people just didn't get into verb conjugations much.

 

[Nemo2]

Pirates got it right....."Aaaarh me hearties".

 

[Jace]

@Paul Anthony...good.one!

 

[hollydolly]

We need our resident teacher @Warrigal on this one...

 

[Warrigal]

Warrigal learnt the grammar (or is that syntax?) of spoken English from my Mum and her sisters. Then in secondary school I studied Latin, French and German in addition to English. Parsing and analysis were required skills and I became very good at them. We were forever doing exercises where we had to correct sentences to remove ambiguity, mixed tenses or inconsistent singulars/plurals.

I realise that teaching methods have moved on and I don't get upset when people who have not had the benefit of my educational experience make simple mistakes. As long as they can be understood I am not fussed. However, I must confess that sometimes when quoting a post I do occasionally do a bit of editing. I do the same to my own posts when I notice similar errors. Can't help myself.