'Here's' or 'There's' Before a Plural

Here’s a sentence I came across recently in an article about California Governor Jerry Brown taking nonessential cell phones from state employees.

“The step is among many Brown has taken to address the state’s massive budget deficit, which now stands at about $13 billion. Here’s a few other things he’s instituted.”

Like “there’s,” the contraction “here’s” gets used a lot in front of plurals, especially when some modifier like “a few other” or “some” comes before the noun. “Here’s some things you should know.” “Here’s all the ways you can look at this problem.”

I don’t remember who taught me so or when, but somewhere I picked up the clear message that, when the stuff that follows is plural, you should use “here are” instead of “here is” or its contracted form “here’s.”

Here are some examples.

Here are all the ways to approach this.

Here are a few of my many relatives.

It’s easy to confuse these structures because they put the subject after the verb, which isn’t all that common in English.

“Here are my cousins” is an inverted way of saying “My cousins are here.” In either case, the true subject of the verb is “cousins.” And because “cousins” is plural, logic dictates that it should take a plural verb like “are” instead of a singular verb like “is.”

Actually, though, there’s no prohibition against using “here’s” before a plural. As with “there’s,” you could make the case that putting “here’s” before a plural is standard in common speech -- idiomatic. So I’m not critical of people who make that choice unless they happen to be members of the media writing for publication. News organizations strive to avoid sloppy, informal, ungrammatical forms. They hold themselves to a higher standard, which seems like a good idea to me.

So it’s unfortunate that the “here’s a few other things” sentence appeared on a blog of a major newspaper, the Orange County Register. In my view, it wasn't a good call.

In a New York Mimic

Recently, I bought a copy of  the New York Times Manual of Style and Usage. I’ve been meaning to do this for years for one reason and one reason only: From time to time while reading the paper I’ve stopped dead in my tracks when I came across a sentence like: “The band was popular in the 1980’s.”

Everyone who knows the first thing about apostrophes knows that they’re not usually used in plurals. One carrot, two carrots. Write it “two carrot’s” and you can end up the butt of jokes that have launched a thousand websites and even a book, “Eats, Shoots and Leaves.”

And though the New York Times doesn't use apostrophes in plurals of carrots, it has long used them in decades. The paper also uses apostrophes in plurals of initials like TV’s, DVD’s, IOU’s, etc. That’s not how others do it. In perhaps 99% of American newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times, the plural of TV is TVs. The plural of DVD is DVDs. And so on. No apostrophe needed.

So I long wondered why the New York Times did it the other way – that is, until I got a copy of their style book.

“Use the apostrophe for plurals formed from letters or numerals (p’s and q’s; size 7’s; B-52’s) and terms like PC’s, TV’s and VCR’s. While many authorities prefer to omit the apostrophe in these cases, it is necessary for clarity in all-uppercase headlines. Therefore use it in other kinds of copy also, for consistency.”

There you have it. A headline wouldn’t say “WARNER TO PRODUCE DVDS” because it’s not clear whether the s is there to form a plural of the initialism or whether it’s one of the initials (which would be pronounced dee-vee-dee-ess). So why not, the paper figures, have the text mimic the headline?

There are a couple of problems with this logic. First, the New York Times doesn’t use many all-caps headlines these days. Most editions I’ve seen lately have just one cover page headline in all caps and the rest in upper and lowercase.

What’s more, when I went to their website to search for examples, I found a number of examples that contradict the Times’ own rule: “…a pared-down selection of the couturier’s signature looks, some dating from the 1980s …” is just one of the examples I found with no apostrophe in the decade.

So, after spending $12 on their style book, I’m no closer to understanding what’s going on there.

My Strong Feelings on the Serial Comma

A lot of people have very (very) strong opinions on the serial comma. It’s absolutely the best way to avoid confusion, some say. It’s absolutely pointless and unnecessary, others insist.

I, too, have a very strong opinion about serial commas, though it’s not in line with either of the two warring camps. Here it is: I passionately, emphatically, vehemently don’t give a hoot. I care so little about this issue that I find it hard to believe anyone else does. For me, it would have to be a pretty slow news year for serial commas command even an ounce of ire (banking deregulation, anyone?).

The serial comma, in case you don’t remember, is the comma before “and” in “red, white, and blue.” If you pay attention to these things, you may have noticed that this comma shows up a lot in books and magazines, yet doesn’t seem to be favored by newspapers. True that.

 Books and magazines tend to follow the Chicago Manual of Style, which is pro serial comma. News media and the public relations industry often follow the Associated Press Stylebook, which says not to use it. So in a newspaper you’d see “red, white and blue.”

In academic circles, I’m told, the serial comma reigns supreme. Its advocates, including the Chicago Manual, insist it can prevent confusion. And, yes, sometimes it can.

Take the sentence: “I’d like to thank my parents, God and Sharon.” Without the comma, the speaker seems to be saying that God and Sharon are his parents. In other words, the coordinate noun phrase “God and Sharon” seems to be functioning as an appositive of “parents.” (An appositive, if you don’t recall, is just a restating of a noun that comes before. “I met with the CEO, Robert, before lunch.”)

Sounds like a pretty good case for the serial comma, huh? 

Not so fast. What if we replaced the plural “parents” with a singular noun phrase, like “my father.” Then our sentence would be, “I’d like to thank my father, God and Sharon.” A serial comma here would backfire: “I’d like to thank my father, God, and Sharon,” because it raises the possibility that “God” is appositive to “father.”

Another argument against the serial comma is that commas separate coordinate adjectives, that is, adjectives that could logically have an “and” between them. “The flag is red, white and blue” could be expressed as “the flag is red and white and blue.” In other words, the commas are standing in for the word “and,” so it doesn’t make sense to have one before “and” in “red, white, and blue.”

 Part of the reason I don’t take sides on this matter is that I edit in both Chicago and AP styles, switching back and forth sometimes several times a day. So maybe I’m too busy trying to keep track of which style I’m using at any given moment to care about which side is more right.

For folks not sure which style to use in their everyday writing, I recommend using the serial comma simply because it’s so much more popular. Most academic writing seems to favor it.

 But deep down in my heart of hearts, I passionately couldn’t care less.

Real-World Subject-Verb Agreement Problems

A while back I came across a website about real estate foreclosure. The site and its main article were trying really hard to convince readers of the company's professionalism and expertise (it was selling an advanced course for prospective real estate investors). The layout wasn’t too sharp, but I wasn’t going to hold that against them. And the site seemed to have a good idea of how to organize information. So in some regards they were living up to the standards of well-polished professional sites.

Then I saw this sentence: “Bank owned properties commonly called REO or real estate owned is one of the most common foreclosure investment practices today.”

I’ve read a lot business writing in my day. In fact, I used to be a proofreader/editor for Business Wire. I was always surprised at how seriously corporations approach the writing and editing of their annual reports and other documents. Reputable companies, I could see, usually have professional editors ensuring the quality and consistency of their copy.

This sentence was a sign -- one of many, actually -- that the website wasn’t in the same league.

In grammar, there’s a lot of talk about subject-verb agreement. It goes like this: your verb should agree in number and person with your subject. It’s “I am,” not “I are.” It’s “he walks,” not “he walk.” But really, who didn’t know that already? It’s so easy to make verbs agree with their subjects that it can make you wonder whether all the talk about agreement problems is a waste.

Then you come across a sentence like this and see that, yes, subject-verb disagreement isn’t just a remote possibility. It’s a real-world problem -- one that can occur quite easily anytime a sentence gets longer than “I am.”

In “Bank owned properties commonly called REO or real estate owned is one of the most common foreclosure investment practices today,” the main verb is “is.” The subject it’s supposed to agree with is a little hard to pin down because it’s surrounded by so much other stuff. But when you zero in on it, you see that the real subject is “properties,” which when paired with your verb gives you “properties is.” Of course, it should be “properties are” in which a plural verb matches a plural subject. But the writer stumbled and there was no editor on the job to catch him.

Of course, there are other problems with this sentence. I’m especially turned off by how the phrase “or real estate owned” isn’t set off by commas. And I don’t like the logic of calling properties a practice. But the subject-verb disagreement is what really gives away that this company isn’t as polished as they’d like people to believe.