956: Mistakes from Convention Jul 22, 2017

Even if people understand how to speak a language, like English, fluently, there is no guarantee that every rule or convention will be followed in certain circumstances. It is indeed quite common for people to misuse 'is' or 'are' depending on if a singular or plural noun or pronoun comes right before it when it the two don't agree, such as the example invented here, "the messages he sent is scandalous" even though 'messages' is plural. Generally these happen in longer, more complicated clauses. People also do this sort of thing quite often putting 'me' at the end of a sentence or clause when it is a subject, and therefore would be 'I'. Much of those two issues arise from people trying to follow convention, rather than simply the grammar; it is after all strange to hear a sentence end with 'I'. It is also due to convention that 'they' takes 'are' as the form of the verb 'to be' when used as a singular, and has done for as long as people have been using that pronoun as singular, instead of 'is' in Standard American English, and most other dialects.