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Pfwoar! Look at the subjunctive on that!
Responding to my musings on the subjunctive, regular reader Reactionry - that's three Rs, but only two elbows - has pointed out a short note by erstwhile NER writer John Derbyshire:
I have two friends, happily married to each other, conservative intellectuals, who met in a library. "We just got chatting one day," she told me. "And the thing that caught my attention was, he used a subjunctive."
I wonder how the conversation went:
"Nice arse."
"Would it were."
Still, it's impressive, and better than liking a man for the size of his wallet. Derbyshire likes the subjunctive.
I record this by way of assisting any of our conservative student readers who would like to find a soul mate. There is no more distinctive marker of the conservative sensibility than accurate use of the subjunctive mood in speech. Outside we few, we happy few conservative intellectuals, use of the subjunctive in spoken speech has pretty much died out. (Would it were otherwise!) But at least we have this tiny verbal marker with which to identify each other, like a Masonic handshake.
If for no other reason, the spoken subjunctive should be cherished because it has survived so long in the teeth of massive popular indifference, and in spite of numerous reports of its demise, going back at least as far as 1856, when the following thing was written:
Our students are taught in school the subjunctive form: if thou have, if he come, etc, and some of them continue in after life to write in that manner, but in the course of more than forty years I have not known three men who have ventured to use that form of the verb in conversation.
— Quoted in Jespersen's Modern English Grammar, Vol. VII, 18.2
I urge all conservatives to work at keeping the subjunctive alive. After all, as Kipling did not quite say: "What stands if the subjunctive fall? Who dies if the subjunctive live?"
Had he confused the pluperfect subjunctive with the conditional perfect, she might never have married him.
By the way, are there any men out there who can see why "may" could not replace "might" in my last sentence? You could be my soul mate (threat or promise?) but not if your participles are hanging.
