grammar - Time and tide waits or wait?



In my grammar book, in a chapter on subject-verb agreement, the author said that when two nouns, joined by and, are suggesting the same idea or person, we consider the nouns as one unit and use a singular verb, e.g. in The novelist and poet is dead.


Among many examples he gave, I caught attention of this one:



Time and tide waits for none.



This didn't appear correct to me. 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. What do you think is correct? And what's the reason behind your answer?


EDIT


A possible duplicate has been raised for my question: Time and tide wait for no man. However, in the mentioned duplicate, the OP is not interested in knowing which construct is correct. He's rather interested in knowing the nuance between tide and time. Hence, the answers provided there also talk about that nuance, rather than answering which construct is correct.



Answer



According to Ngram, wait is around 10x more popular than waits, and has been since about 1850, and this doesn't subtract out the enormous number of waits instances which are actually illustrating the difference between the two versions (and the erroneousness of using waits).


However, one of the earliest occurrences of the saying was in The Disappointment or the Force of Credulity, 1796, by Andrew Barton, and Barton rendered the saying as "Time and tide waits for no one."


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