Is the Tampa Tribune’s story about a grammar-challenged sign grammar-challenged?
January 21, 2009 at 4:33 pm by Wayne GarciaLet me start off with a few disclaimers:
I am not a grammarian, and Lee Drury De Cesare, aka Grammar Grinch, has taken my stories apart in the past.
I’m not an English teacher, although I have a lengthy resume of teaching journalism and writing at the college level.
And I don’t really give a shit whether a downtown Tampa sign has a (mostly unnoticeable) grammatical error in it, nor whether Mayor Pam Iorio wants to get rid of said sign because of that error.
But the Tampa Tribune apparently does:
Super Bowl visitors entering the city’s downtown next week will be greeted by this message: “Welcome to Downtown Tampa: There’s so many reasons to love it.”
Sounds like a nice message. But there’s a problem. The banner, at Franklin and Platt streets near Channelside Drive, contains a glaring error: The subject and verb in the second part don’t match.
Grammatically speaking, “There’s” should be “There are” or “There’re.”
So a buddy who is pretty good with words called me and said: “There’re”?
A contraction for “there are?” Not a real word. Maybe not grammatically correct, he posited.
I wasn’t sure, so I checked a few dictionaries.
Is “there’re” in Merriam-Webster? No.
Is it in dictionary.com? No.
In fact, the only sorta-authoritative mention of “there’re” that I can find is at Wiktionary. It says:
there’re
1. (colloquial) Contraction of there are.
* “I say there’re no depressed words just depressed minds.” — attributed to Bob Dylan
Any English teachers out there want to weigh in on this one? Or Dylanologists?
