Q. I recently heard the expression, "I find the whole business are cane." Shouldn't it be "is cane?"

A.     No, it’s “are cane”—although nowadays you’ll find it abbreviated or, as the grammatical experts say, elided. In its original stage it had an apostrophe, “ar’cane,” which closed up into the modern “arcane.” This modern elision effectively conceals its earliest usage in Jamaican sugar fields, where it referred not to sweetness, as some ignoramuses think, but to the dense obscurity of the thick cane breaks. “Ah’m not goin’ into the ar’cane” was the common expression then, signaling fear of the lugubrious and unknown—now applicable to fields of any mysterious or unpenetrable endeavor. In any case it is never singular, though it is unexpected.