Editor’s note: Welcome to InDepthNH.org’s column Speaking of Words. Michael Ferber retired from the English Department at UNH, but has plenty more to say and write about words. We are thrilled he wants to do that for our readers. Welcome Michael!
MICHAEL FERBER, Speaking of Language
I don’t want my columns to be filled with pet peeves, but I can’t help feeling sad and a little peevish over the worsening health of the subjunctive mood in English. It is not dead yet, but it is languishing through neglect, and I would like to do my bit to revive it in the little ICU of this column.
The verb in English has, or used to have, three moods. The indicative mood is for making statements, for asserting something as a fact, whether truly or falsely, such as English grammar is interesting. All the sentences in this essay so far are in the indicative mood. The imperative mood is for making commands, such as Sit down or Do your grammar homework. The subjunctive mood is a type of what linguists call irrealis moods. It is used for several purposes other than asserting, such as wishing, proposing, or theorizing, where it is understood that what is wished for, proposed, or theorized does not (yet) exist or has not (yet) taken place.
There are two main types, which might be called subjunctive 1 and subjunctive 2, which is what they are called in German grammar. They both contrast with the indicative.
Consider these three sentences, with different forms of the verb come:
- He comes on time. (indicative)
- I insist (that) he come on time. (subjunctive 1)
- I wish he came on time. (subjunctive 2)
If you said I insist that he comes on time, you would be insisting that you know the truth of the matter (that he really does come on time), and that is not a subjunctive use. The subjunctive 1 is sometimes called the mandative subjunctive. Another example: I move he be expelled from the meeting. There are other uses of this form of the subjunctive, notably in set phrases such as Long live the King! And God bless America.
The second kind is called the contrary-to-fact subjunctive. I wish I were a bird. If only Obama were still President! You’re not a bird, and he is not still President. The were form looks like a past tense, but it is not. It also looks like a plural, but it is not. Only in the indicative mood is were a past plural form. But therein lies the trouble. English verbs today have very few forms, as many older forms have merged. So I imagine a speaker whose experience of the language is limited might start to say If I were you, but then correct himself mistakenly because were feels plural, and say instead If I was you. It might then occur to him that was is a past tense, and since that makes no sense he might correct it to the present: If I am you. I have heard this construction, though not very often yet. More common is the recent habit of sports announcers to turn the subjunctive type 2 into a kind of timeless present. Where they used to say If he had fielded the ball cleanly he would have thrown the runner out (the subjunctive followed by the conditional), now they say If he fields the ball cleanly he throws the runner out, as if they are reliving the play on slo-mo.
There are a few other uses of the subjunctive, notably with come, such as come what may and come hell and high water, and the somewhat different I will have worked here twenty years come September. We also have Be it ever so humble, there is no place like home, which differs subtly from Were it ever so humble, there would be no place like home. These fossilized uses are confined to certain set phrases.
So even on the lips of a well-educated speaker, the English subjunctive is a shadow of its former self. Consider these lines from the last act of Shakespeare’s Macbeth:
Well, march we on,
To give obedience where ’tis truly owed.
Meet we the medicine of the sickly weal,
And with him pour we in our country’s purge
Each drop of us.
All three verbs are subjunctives, and as good subjunctives they begin their clauses and even precede their subjects (we). Today we would insert Let us before the verb and drop the we. Another example that we hear every year is Don we now our gay apparel, but even if we sing this carol we rarely think, “Oh, what a nice subjunctive!” Even most of us grammar-sticklers have lost touch with the subjunctive as a realm of forms and meanings quite different from the indicative. So when we study even another modern language such as French or German we may at first feel surprised and daunted by the much richer realm of subjunctive forms and uses they have, though with them too it is gradually diminishing.
If you don’t like the subjunctive you should feel grateful you’re not an ancient Greek, for Greek had two irrealis moods, the subjunctive and the optative, with a full panoply of forms and meanings in each mood. Even after many years of reading Greek I still sometimes fail to discern the subtle differences between them, but I admire this language, which Greek children had no trouble learning, for its lavish proliferation of prefixes and suffixes, so that one Greek verb might require six or seven English words to translate it.
The English subjunctive mood is not in a good mood in its retirement home. It needs exercise and some TLC. Make it your New Year’s resolution to pay it a visit, bring it flowers, and take it for a walk.
I am happy to hear from readers with questions or comments: mferber@unh.edu. Apologies for the lines of incomprehensible characters that nay have showed up in the last column. Some Greek letters and a few odd Roman ones didn’t survive the transfer from one system to another. We’re working on the problem.