Many months ago, I celebrated what I still call the subjunctive mood. Now I’m going to rant.
We needn’t call it the subjunctive. Let’s call it contrary-to-fact expressions, or contrafactuals. We all know that the language has evolved to render the previously standard verb form in these expressions almost obsolete. Saying, as most do, “If I was hungry, I’d eat your darn casserole,” leaves no room for misunderstanding. The speaker is proclaiming himself not hungry—or at least not hungry enough for Mom’s macaroni tuna. Stuffed shirts may balk at such language use, or circle it angrily on students’ papers, but most of us have accepted the vanishing subjunctive as a natural development, unlike, say, anthropogenic global warming.
The real danger lies in the hypercorrective use of contrafactual locutions when nothing is contrary to fact. Like the use of “whomever” as a…