zompist wrote:Jeremy, where are you from? I'm wondering if this is a regional thing.
Norfolk County, Ontario. It's a rural county where a lot of British loyalists settled during/after the American Revolution. (And yes, that's still important to some of the residents, to a surprising degree. Tip: do not suggest that Canada should drop Queen Elizabeth as head of state while talking to elderly residents of Norfolk County.) So, an area with a mixture of British and American usages. What was taught to me in elementary school depended on the background of the particular teacher.
I don't have enough background in phonetics to accurately describe what "Here're" sounds like in my dialect, but the syllable-final
r is definitely not dropped, and the two
rs are distinct from one another. In dialects which drop syllable final
r, I imagine it's a practical necessity to use 's instead.
zompist wrote:I think "there's" and "here's" are on the way to becoming an existential construction unmarked for plurality. A few random examples from Googling:
Surely there's a more authoritative source than Googling? Examples of every grammatical error can be found that way, not to mention every other sort of error. That said, I'm certainly aware of how widespread the usage is, especially in speech.
I'm comfortable using "here's" and "there's" with singular nouns joined by a conjunction, e.g., "In every crisis there's a winner and a loser." In my head that reads as "... there's a winner and there's a loser" with the repeated subject and verb omitted. It's only when plurals appear that my brain insists 'are' should replace 'is'.
I suppose the real question is how an author should balance (a) making some readers more comfortable by writing informally, and (b) avoiding irritating some readers with "errors".
) doesn't that mean there is a Higgs force?"
