was "were not was"
was "were not was"
- Subject: was "were not was"
- From: Malcolm Fitzgerald <email@hidden>
- Date: Sat, 31 Aug 2002 11:41:54 +1000
Ah! Saturday and the luxury of time. Time to pause. Time to read.
Time to remember. Time to plot...
Here we are, the scholar's crutch, Fowler's Modern English Usage 2ed
(1965) reprinted 1980. Fowler's dictionary has been in print for more
than seventy-five years. It is a reliable reference when arguments
arise on the use of mood, tense, pluralisation, etc. I prefer it to
the grammar module supplied by MS Word ;-)
Michelle. On pluralisation, Fowler finds that media and medium are
both correct but uses medium. See Latin Plurals and -um.
My many learned tutors. On the use of the subjunctive, with arguments
based on mood, tense, sequence and so on. Fowler devotes more than
three pages to the subjunctive. There are several references to the
"if ... were" construction. I won't reproduce the whole piece. His
advice is not to use it, making "was" a better choice than "were."
(Of course, I wouldn't be writing a detailed account of how right
*you* were.) To paraphrase, subjunctives are misused so often that a
case can be made for avoiding them altogether. In part, and this from
an Edwardian perspective, he suggests the subjunctive can make the
text pompous! For all the gory details, see Subjunctive and Latin
Tenses.
Perhaps my tutors are trying to revive an older form? Otherwise, it
seems the North American's have preserved a form which was deprecated
in other strands of english some time ago.
Now, where was I?
--
--
Malcolm Fitzgerald email@hidden
Database Manager
http://www.asauthors.org
The Australian Society of Authors ph: 02 93180877 fax: 02 93180530
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