Time and tide wait or wait?
I just read the answer of time
- and tide wait for no man 6 answers. When
two nouns, joined by and, are suggesting the same idea or person, we consider the nouns as one unit and we use a singular verb e.g.. In The novelist and poet is dead.
It is not what you think, but time and tide wait
for nothing. I caught your attention on this one. I also think one. Time and tide wait for none.
What appears to be my own opinion? I think it should have been:
Time and tide wait for none.
I went on to look on the internet and found conflicting resolutions to this. Different references said differently. Is wrong with everything? Why do you answer anything given in your answer?
How
much more does time and tide wait for no man to arrive? In the mentioned duplicate, the OP is not interested in knowing which construct is correct. Why is man interested in time and tide? Hence, the answers provided there also talk about that nuance, rather than answering which construct is correct.
According to Ngram, wait is around 10x more popular than waits, and has been since about 1850, and this doesn’t add out the enormous numbers of waits instances which are actually illustrating the difference between the two versions (and the error of using waits ).
Do you have any earliest instances of “Time and tide wait for no one.”? “Most
of us are tired/worried and we need help. “
