Mind your language
THE SUBJUNCTIVE. makes my head spin. The trouble is that it's becoming extinct, like whom, and we don't know when to use it. It is particularly trouble- some in conditional clauses, those ones where you use if (If you were the only girl in the world.') But I think I've found the aspirin to this headache: it is called Bagnall's Rule.
It is to be found in a new book called Newspaper Language by Nicholas Bag- nall and it goes like this: Use were for something which might happen now or in the future if it is to happen at all. (`If I were the prime min- ister.') Use was for things which may or may not have happened in the past. Cif he was drunk he didn't show it.')
I thought about this for some time, using Venn diagrams and flow charts and, could not help thinking eventually that he was right.
Of course it is possible to think of counter-examples from older writers. Not that the Oxford English Dictionary is much help, listing, as it does, the were form under the heading 'Past subjunc- tive'. So it gives, from the poem The Owl and the Nightingale' (circa 1250), `Yif ich were a bisimere' (bisimere means ant, I think, as in pismire, from the smell of its nest.) A more complicated usage from the 18th century comes in one of Sterne's Yorick sermons: 'A man of whom, was you to form a conjecture. . .' But this belongs more to the oddities of the so- called verb to be, which I hope to return to. Meanwhile stick to Bagnall's Rule.
Dot Wordsworth
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