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If I Were the King of Grammar…
What a great topic for this month’s group writing. The first thing I thought to write on was, “If I were a rich man…” Unfortunately, my wife told me it had already been done.
I had to think of something else. I have general handyman skills, but I’ve never done fine carpentry work. I would love to have those sorts of skills. “If I were a carpenter…” And then my wife said that had also been done before.
Well, then I thought, I’ve always wanted to dance. But…
Well, it seems like there are a whole lot of people out there writing songs in the subjunctive mood. Now, of course, everyone on Ricochet knows about the subjunctive mood, as well as the English language’s other moods: indicative, interrogative, imperative, injunctive, optative, and potential.
I have a confession to make: I never learned about moods in an English grammar class. When I was going to school, it seems like we never finished getting through the textbooks. Maybe my peers were just more disruptive than most, and it meant we went through the information more slowly than planned. Or maybe the plan was bad and no class was getting through the whole thing. Of course, it wasn’t just grammar books that were never finished. I never had a history class that got to or past World War II. And I’m not that old. Before the first day I had darkened the door of a school building, we had had more than twenty years of history since WWII. Well, it wasn’t like I was going to read the rest of the school books in my spare time over the summer, either. I had too much to do over the summer. I was a kid. I had to whine about being bored. Do you know how much time that takes? You don’t have enough time to do that if you’re reading a grammar book.
No, the first time I heard of the subjunctive mood, it wasn’t spelled that way. It was «le subjonctif». I learned about moods in high school French class. It left me wondering what else I didn’t know about English grammar. How come nobody had ever told me about this stuff before? It really put me into a mood that was more grumpy than subjunctive. There I was, Wile E. Coyote, Super-Genius High-School Student, and I had never heard of grammar moods before. I do declare!
If I were Grammar King, I would ensure everyone knew all the beautiful grammar things we have in our languages. Languages are complex emergent creations. Nobody sat down one day and said, “Dudes, what we really need is a subjunctive mood in our grammar.” No, it emerged out of the practice of peoples’ trying to communicate long ago. And this is a tool in the toolbox of our language. We have subtle ways of indicating moods through word choices. I would have everyone know such facets of the beautiful gem that is our grammar.
How about you, my Ricochet friends? Was there anything in school that you seemed to miss learning when you should have? Perhaps something you stumbled across later?
Published in Group Writing
It’s interesting to me that in my editing work, I almost never see the subjunctive used in place of the simple past. It’s a correction that I make without even thinking about it anymore because I do it so often. Over the thirty years I’ve been editing, this has been a change–that is, from writers’ using the subjunctive to not using it. When I started out, I almost never had to fix a use of the past tense to the subjunctive.
In fact, I would go a step further and say that modern writers don’t understand verb tenses very well at all. They seem to know only three: simple past, present, simple future. That may seem like a small matter, but it’s not. The inability to use all of the tenses and moods creates problems in recounting events. The English language has a rich catalog of tenses with which to describe events that happened in the past. Once we know we are talking about the past, while we are there, we can describe the future and past within that time frame the writer established at the beginning of the passage. The sequence of events is easy for us to follow.
Writers’ not deploying verb tenses fluently leads to a tremendous loss of meaning. And at some level, it also diminishes our thinking. The English language creates an operating system in our mind for thinking things through. We’ve really corrupted the system over the last twenty years. That is bound to show up in oversimplified thinking.
I just thought of a good example of the loss of knowledge of verb tenses. When did anyone last see “had had” in writing? “He had had the disease before, but it didn’t hit him as hard then as it did the second time.” The absence of “had had” is very noticeable in the myriad articles I’ve read on disease resistance in the last eight months. :-)
A good example.
Only everything I know about God’s physical world and Man’s thought. My public schools were performative day care at best. For better or worse, I am an autodidact.
Reminds me of the old language puzzle: by adding punctuation, turn the following into a grammatical and meaningful sentence.
Nu uh, you can’t make me!
I assume punctuation includes strike-through?