🤬 Expletives Are No F*@KING Joke
In this short lesson, we’ll be talking about expletives—but NOT the kind that means ‘profanities’ or ‘swear words.’
👨🏻🎓 In grammar, expletives are sometimes called “dummy pronouns.” They occur in clauses beginning with “it” or “there” when the “it” or “there” does not refer to anything. Although very few people we know are familiar with the term in the grammatical context, they are extremely common; we bet you used dozens of sentences today that began with expletives.
For example, the following sentences start with expletives:
It is vital that you arrive to the concert on time.
There were several raucous students at the football game.
😌 Fortunately, the rules for expletives are straightforward:
When “it” is an expletive, it always takes a singular verb.
It is finally time to go home! 🏃🏻♀️💨💨
It is amusing that children still believe in the Tooth Fairy. 🦷🧚🏻♀️
It was an exhausting undertaking to organize my parents’ garage.
When “there” is an expletive, the number of the verb is determined by the number of the noun phrase that follows:
There is a place we all call “home.” 🏡👪
There were hundreds of fans in line for autographs. 😍📝
There was an error in your calculations. 🧮
There were six spelling mistakes on your handwritten essay.
Give the following questions a try:
The meteorologist claims that it ( is | are ) going to snow this weekend in Los Angeles. ☃
When we looked at the expansive menu, we learned that there ( is | are ) more than 22 different types of fried chicken. 🍗
The college tour guide candidly admitted that there really ( isn’t | aren’t ) much to do on campus during the winter holiday. 🏫👻
Last year, there ( was | were ) a surprising increase in the number of students applying to small liberal arts colleges in Alaska.
According to Nan, it ( is | are ) painfully obvious and understandable that there ( has | have ) been more accidents on the busy street leading to the new shopping mall. 🚗💥🚙
💁🏻♂️ Here are the answers:
is
are
isn’t
was
is, have
