Suppose it were subjunctive

JUNE CASAGRANDE

My $18 Associated Press Stylebook wouldn’t tell me. My $8 Strunk and

White’s “The Elements of Style” wouldn’t tell me. My $55 “Chicago

Manual of Style” wouldn’t tell me. “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to

Grammar and Style” ($16) wouldn’t tell me. “Painless Grammar” ($9)

wouldn’t tell me.

All the books listed above are happy to tell me when to use the

subjunctive mood. But none tell me how to use the subjunctive mood.

The closest any of the books in my personal library came to

actually helping me understand the subjunctive mood was Bill Walsh’s

“Lapsing Into a Comma” ($15): “For a thorough discussion of the

subjunctive mode, get a good grammar book.”

The “subjunctive mood” (also called “mode”) refers to two

noodle-scratching scenarios you’re likely to recognize. One has to do

with why you say, “I wish I were going” instead of “I wish I was

going.” The other takes shape in bizarre and old-fashioned

expressions such as, “be that as it may” or “I can help him, even

though it be inconvenient for me.”

For anyone who just wants to avoid embarrassing flubs but doesn’t

care about the grammatical rules involved, here’s the quick how-to.

The subjunctive is used when you’re talking about something

hypothetical -- a suggestion, a doubt, a wish, a regret or any other

contrary-to-fact condition. For ideas hinged on an “if,” ask yourself

whether you’re talking about a genuine possibility, “If I am

threatened, I will quit” or a hypothetical situation, ‘If I were

threatened, I would quit,” (credit to the Chicago Manual for those

examples). Often, it’s a tough judgment call. But that’s the basic

difference.

Sentences with “wish” are even easier. Because they’re pretty much

always hypothetical, they always get “were.” I wish I were able to

explain that better.

All this stuff I knew already. But I wanted to know more. For

example, isn’t the following a subjunctive: “I suggest you read the

book.” And, further, why is it that when I change “you” to “he” in

that example, it sounds better to say, “I suggest he read the book”

instead of “he reads”?

(Note that “that” clauses are also subjunctive. “They demanded

that he walk the plank.”)

This is the point at which I found myself considering whether to

burn $121 worth of books. Then I remembered Walsh’s advice. I began

to rifle through “The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language”

until I saw the price tag: $160. So I moseyed over to “The Oxford

English Grammar,” which for $50 told me what I wanted to know.

The subjunctive affects only two tenses: the present and the

simple past.

To conjugate any verb for the subjunctive in the present tense,

use the “base form” of the verb. The base form of “to be” is “be.”

The base form of “to walk” is “walk.” The base form of “to read” is

“read.” Think of it as the infinitive minus the word “to.” And that’s

why the subjunctive “I suggest you read” uses the same verb form as

“I suggest he read.” They’re both subjunctive.

But only one is noticeably different because only one differs from

how you’d say it in the “indicative” (or normal) mood. In the

indicative, you’d say, “You read books al the time.” But you’d

conjugate “to read” differently for the third person. “He reads books

all the time.” In the subjunctive, though, both get “read” without

the S. That’s the base form of “to read.”

All that applies only to the present tense. In the past tense, all

uses other than the “were” stuff above are archaic. So while

technically, “If the canary sang, I would be pleased” is a

subjunctive situation, it comes out the same as the indicative. That

is, you don’t change “sang” to “sing” because in the past tense, you

don’t change anything except forms of “to be” into “were.”

Ditto for: “I wish I had not spent $171 to figure that out.”

* JUNE CASAGRANDE is a freelance writer. She can be reached at

[email protected].