by Eva van Loon

“Papas no hay!” yells my kid, head in the fridge, searching for dinner.

“Huh?” I am unprepared for Spanish.

“There’s no potatoes!” she transla-shouts.

“Aaarggh!” I snarl back. “There are no potatoes!”
“That’s what I said.”

“No. You said, ‘There is no potatoes.’”

“Right!” She’s exasperated with her nearest ancestor, who is clearly on the edge of dementia or at least maddeningly selectively deaf. “There’s no potatoes.”

I try teaching by example: “There is no potato. There are no potatoes. Get it? There is for a singular noun; there are for a plural noun.”

“Grammar Nazi. There isn’t even one potato. Singular shmingular; plural shmural.”

Being called names grants me leave to complain. “In my day, we could all handle this construction by no later than Grade Three.”

“Your day is over.” She’s a genius at stating the obvious. “Why can’t English behave like Spanish? No hay un papa. No hay papas. No matter how many potatoes there aren’t, it’s no hay. One potato, two potato, three potato, four—it’s always no hay. Simple.”

“It’s not Standard English,” I try to interject, but she’s on a rant, now, showing off her new lingo.

“How about French? “Il y a une pomme de terre. Il y a des pommes de terre. It’s il y a no matter how many potatoes there are.”

“Aha!” I pounce. “There are? Or there is?”
Her turn to glower. “What does il y a really mean, anyway?”

Successfully distracted, I ponder. “I guess it literally translates as he, she, or it has there…whatever it is you’re talking about, which would explain why French—or Spanish—doesn’t need to differentiate between one thing or more things.” I’m warming up. “But English is different, you see—“

Her eyes glaze over, but I persist. “There’s no indefinite he, she or it hanging around in Standard-English-grammar space to govern the verb—”
“Govern the verb? Grammar politics?”

“There’s no politics in grammar. Shut up. You see, there is an adverb. Putting an adverb in front of a sentence doesn’t affect the way the verb works. One potato is there. Two potatoes are there. Simple.”

“English is never simple.” She speaks with the authority of Youth Who Have Found the Truth. “There’s better ways to say things.”

I cringe. “That’s Englese, I suppose?”

“You love fusion cuisine—why not fusion grammar?”

“Confusion grammar!”

She glowers. “Did it ever occur to you and your coven of Grammar Gremlins that grammars can be combined just the way French and Spanish cooking are combined for fusion cuisine? There’s ways!”

I cringe anew. reflecting that not only have I utterly failed as a grammatical parent, but her exposure to Standard English cuisine has been negligible. “English cooking is…well, so English that there’s no fusion possible! It’s the same with Standard English—there are so many peccadilloes and peculiarities, only fools would venture into the grammar hell where angels fear to tread! You can’t turn an adverb into a pronoun any more than you can turn a potato into a papaya!”

She sticks her head inside the fridge again in self defense; emerges triumphant, holding a tiny bottle of clear liquid. “There’s fruit of the potato!” An impish grin: “There’s just two drinks left.”

I give up and toast the future. “Here’s to Englese!”

“How come there’s was wrong but here’s is right?” she says, mock-innocent, a catty cunning gleam in one eye.

‘There’s an ellipse, cretin.”

“Grammar Nazi.”

Standard English — Englese
There’s no excuse. — There’s no excuse.
There are no excuses. — There’s no excuses.
There’s a lot of confusion. — There’s a lot of confusion.
There are lots of issues. — There’s lots of issues.