@Curious indeed - you might, but it would seem that not so many others would:

"I've to say" - Google hits - 3 million
"I've got to say" - Google hits - 62 million
"I have to say" - Google hits - 92 milion

The truth is that not many people contract "I have" to "I've", and it doesn't sound very natural to me. "I've got", on the other hand, does.

http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=I%27ve+to+say%2CI%27ve+got+to+say&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=16&smoothing=3&share=

@BrockawayBaby - 18 months later. I'm afraid it's not as simple as that. Let's take the word 'government'. After an election we might say "There is a new government", but later on that the government "are introducing a new law". Sometimes we see the government as an entity, sometimes as a group of people.

"My family have decided to move to Nottingham." - real flesh and blood people
"The average family has 3.6 members" - a concept
"My firm are wonderful. They do all they can do for me." - the managers etc
"My firm was founded in the 18th century" - an entity

I don't think we often use plural after the construction "There is/are" when the noun is singular, except with expressions like "There are a number of ...". Nor do we usually use a plural verb before a group noun, only after it.

And I'm afraid these sentences wouldn't seem natural to me even in the singular:

"There is the team, Manchester United, leaving the field in glory."
"There is the band, Radiohead, conquering the world."
"There is the group of Americans messing up grammar for the rest of us."

Why say team, or band here? We know what they are.
"And there's Manchester United, leaving the field"
"And there's Radiohead," conquering the world."

And no doubt some Brits (but not me, of course) might say:

" There's a group of Americans messing up grammar for the rest of us." (NB a, not the!) - Actually it's more likely to be the other way around, as the American feel for grammar seems to be rather more formal than ours. I think 'singular the", for example, is much more of an issue for Americans than Brits.

And it equally pains me to hear that the family, a bunch of flesh and blood individuals, "is" coming for Christmas. It is, as AnWulf says, a British thing. We usually see group nouns or collective nouns as representing a group of individuals rather than a unit. It's just a different way of thinking, that's all. Americans seem happier with formal agreement, while we prefer notional agreement. In the right context, neither is more correct than the other.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_American_and_British_English#Formal_and_notional_agreement

I had a look at that Metadyne piece linked to above and have one or two issues with it. My (very) detailed response with lots of examples can be found here:

http://random-idea-english.blogspot.com/2013/01/some-random-thoughts-about-ise-and-ize.html

@Skeeter Lewis - it depends what you call traditional. Until the eighteenth century -ize seems to have dominated, yes. But in the nineteenth century it was the turn of -ise, and writers like Dickens, George Eliot and the Brontes were all first published with -ise verbs. It is -ize that has made a re-appearance, not -ise. And I doubt very much whether my either my parents or grandparents used -ize. Here's David Crystal, who knows more about British English than most people:

"The influence of American textbooks in Britain has caused US spellings to become common in the UK - such as the often encountered -z for -s in such words as atomize, atomizer, atomizable, atomization." (Stories of English p477)

@Hairy Scot - You've got a thing about this, haven't you? Nice story. But table service in a Scottish bar? :)

@dracula - from Online Etymology Dictionary:

Hung emerged as pp. in the 16c. in northern England dialect, and hanged endured only in legal language (which tends to be conservative) and metaphors extended from it (I'll be hanged).

@dracula - could you perhaps enlighten us disgraceful, naive and uneducated but ever eager to learn masses as to how you came across this strange theory that there is a verb - "hang, hanged, hung", when every (at least British) dictionary tells us there are two variants - "hang, hanged, hanged" and "hang, hung, hung". Is there something you know that they don't? I think we should be told!

http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/hang

Being an English teacher, I'm now off to play with the rest of my troop of unqualified baboons.

I'm with porsche, JMMB, nigel and douglas.bryant. And so, it would seem, are quite a few dictionaries. Here are few sentences given as examples as how to use 'yet':

He has a good job, and yet he never seems to have any money. (Oxford Advanced Learner's)
He's overweight and bald, (and) yet somehow, he's attractive. (Cambridge)
She does not speak our language and yet she seems to understand what we say. (Longman's)
I want to and yet I haven't the courage (Collins)

And what about the elliptical expression standing on its own: "I don't really need another new jacket. And yet!"

I have to confess that I really can't understand this preoccupation with redundancy in spoken language. If you're writing your Master's thesis, maybe, but in normal conversation? In fact, linguists reckon that a bit of redundancy is often very useful as an aid to understanding.

And even in formal writing, if a piece is crap, however much redundancy you remove, it's still going to be crap.On the other hand if you write a brilliant piece, nobody's going to worry about the odd "whether or not" etc. After all, some of the best writers do it.

@EW Thornton - Sorry, but I beg to disagree. Mr Blues specifically referred to people "labelling and designating" Blues music as simple (presumably as opposed to complex). Now if this is true, and I'm sure Mr Blues knows what he's talking about, then to my mind that has at least as much to to do with categorising and naming as with describing, if not more so.

From Oxford Dictionaries Online -
label (verb) - assign to a category, especially inaccurately or restrictively:
"many pupils felt that they were labelled as failures"
"the critics labelled him a loser"

From American Heritage Dictionaries via The Free Dictionary
designate - 2. To give a name or title to; characterize.

I have absolutely no problem with misconception, but I don't see things in quite such black and white terms as you do, and I feel that very often we have a choice, perhaps depending on the particular nuance we want to give something. And I think this is one of those cases.

Hi, Brus. Back from your travels already? I could always try doing a Captain Mainwaring and say "I was wondering which of one you would be the first to spot my deliberate mistake", but I don't suppose you'd swallow that one. Let's just call it a schadenfreudian slip. My slip, your schadenfreude.

I still think No 2 at Oxford and 2b at the American Heritage Dictionary cover it - Mr Blues says explicitly that other people have labelled or designated (i.e. named) Blues as 'simple' music, a name that has been "inaccurately" or "unsuitably" applied. So I think it's fair for Mr Blues to call it a misnomer. Which is not to say it's not also a misconception. I think something can be both a misconception and a misnomer, it just depends on the which way you look at it. They can both be right.