things are getting worser

i don't why this bothers me so much, but laely i am noticing a lot of people on radio and television who don't understand some basic rules of grammar.

specifically, i hear this a lot on the history channel-- the narrator will say "a squadron of planes were" . . . "a pair of jets were" . . . those are just little examples. Please tell me dear reader, that you know the subject of those sentences are singular . . . i heard a reporter on public radiomake the same mistake the other day. I can sort of forgive an extemporaneous reporter making a flub like that but not in someone reading a written text/narration. it's not an isolated problem either, it's almost like they never do it right.

I suspect it is a function of ever descreasing writing communications that we fall into this trap of picking plurality/ singularity of a verb by the noun closest to it. But it bugs me. --jl