Here's — Plurality Question

Question

A phrase I came across tonight was "Here's the good news and the bad news." Trouble is, "Here's" means "Here is", and "is" is meant for one thing, not two things. I'm describing two things. However, "Here are the good news and the bad news" sounds bizarre.

What to do?

Answer 1

Lot's of idiomatic usages are "grammatically incorrect". You can analyse this particular one to find supposed justifications for it being in some way "grammatical", but the fact of the matter is even educated speakers commonly say things like Here's John and Mary, and Where's the scissors?

Part of what's involved here is proximity agreement (aka the proximity principle) which causes us to inflect the verb according to the first subject, even if there are others following.

I believe it's also relevant that we tend to do this more often when the subjects ("subject", with something like scissors which are grammatically plural but semantically singular) are perceived as a single thing. Thus, "the news" is effectively one thing containing some good and some bad parts. And John and Mary are being spoken of as one couple arriving, rather than two separate people.

Answer 2

I perceive it as "Here's the good news and [here is] the bad news."

Answer 3

It rather looks as if here's, like there's, is becoming an invariable expression, used to introduce either one or several things, events or ideas. So we might say 'Here's a few ideas to throw around', just as we might say 'There's a pub, a railway station and a shop in my village'.

Answer 4

I believe that this is because "news" is considered a noun itself while "good" is the adjective describing "news" which means that the singular of "be" (is) works in this situation.

Answer 5

I think that is the result of ambiguity caused by sentence construction. It is possible to alter it using parallel structure. Parallel clauses:

 Here is god news and here is bad news.

Parallel adjectives:

 Here is good and bad news.

Answer 6

There are two issues here.

As it is,

"Here's the good news and the bad news."
is correct, seeing an ellipsis:
"Here's the good news and here's the bad news."

Furthermore, Here's/ Here it is are more idiomatic than they seem. So, sometimes it is a tendency to use the idiom before anything irrespective of whether it is singular or plural.

Answer 7

This is a great question. It really boils down to whether or not the community of speakers accepts a statement as valid or not. In this case, "Here's..." is what we accept. Remember that linguists describe usage, rather than prescribe it. It's really important to understand the previous sentence if one is going to approach language studies from a linguists point of view. Imposing rules on a group of speakers is not in our job description, so to speak. The rules emanate from within, not without.

To rationalize what is going on in the sample sentence "Here's the good news and the bad news." I think we have to infer that "the news" here is presented as a single group of both the good and the bad.