Subjective tense
William Safire's most recent "On Language" column (
NYT Magazine 3/30/08, p. 18) looks
at the now-famous quote from Geraldine Ferraro, "If Obama was a white
man, he would not be in this position." Then comes a
parenthetical digression on grammar:
"Get this," Sam Pakenham-Walsh, member
of the Nitpickers League, said in an e-mail message, "we no longer use
the subjective tense! Has all our education been for naught?"
Because Ferraro's statement posed a condition contrary to fact, her "if
Obama was a white man" should
have been were.
Yes, "subjective tense", in a grammar peeve. Has all our
education been for naught?
Mr. Verb was
on
the case (or, you might say, mood) immediately:
If the Nitpickers League cares about
standards, Mr. Pakenham-Walsh's membership card is in grave danger. If
you google "subjective tense" you get mostly the expected thing, namely
people using tense when they
appear to mean mood, while
simultaneously using subjective
when they mean subjunctive.
Some of these come from folks like Mr. P-W, that is from card-carrying
peevologists. Hilariously, Safire let this go through. (The [Language]
Log has had entire strings about the related issue of the 'passive
tense' but I don't see mention of 'subjective tense' over there on a
quick glance.)
Our most recent expedition into the land of the passive tense was led
by Geoff Pullum
here,
quoting an
earlier
posting of mine about how
tense
gets used as an all-purpose label for a grammatical category, pretty
much any grammatical category, of verbs (and maybe other parts of
speech as well). My guess is that
tense is just the first such
technical term that people come across in school, so that's the word
they use when they want to sound educated and technical. It's a
kind of meta-hypercorrection.
Apparently, we haven't noted
subjective
for
subjunctive on Language
Log, though some time ago Mark Liberman and I
commented
on "passive gerund" for "progressive aspect", again from someone
who really ought to know better.
While I'm on the subject of subjunctives, let me express amazement,
once again, that so many people are so exercised about the use of the
ordinary past rather than a special counterfactual form (often called
"the subjunctive" or "the past subjunctive") for expressing conditions
contrary to fact. The special counterfactual form is incredibly
marginal: it's distinct from the ordinary past for only one verb in the
language,
BE, and then only with 1st and 3rd person
singular subjects, so it does hardly any work. And using the
ordinary past rather than the special counterfactual form virtually
never produces expressions that will be misunderstood in context.
Yes, you can construct examples that are potentially ambiguous out of
context, but in actual practice there's almost never a problem, as you
can see from two facts:
- all conditionals with past tense
verb forms in them, for every single verb in the language other than BE,
and for BE with 2nd person or plural subjects, are
potentially ambiguous out of context, yet in actual practice, there's
almost never a problem; and
-
the nit-pickers are, in my experience, flawless at determining
when a was in a conditional
is to be understood counterfactually (and so "should be" replaced by were) -- which means that they
understood the speaker's or writer's intentions perfectly.
As a result, appeals to "preserving distinctions" that are "important
for communication" and to "avoiding ambiguity" are baseless and
indefensible in this case. There's absolutely nothing wrong with
using the special counterfactual form — I do so
myself — but there's
also nothing wrong with using the ordinary past to express
counterfactuality. It's a matter of style and personal choice,
and no matter which form you use, people will understand what you are
trying to say.
But somehow preserving the last vestige of a special counterfactual
form has become a crusade for some people. There are surely
better causes.
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at March 31, 2008 01:39 PM