IN THE MOOD
Part the Second

by James Lincoln Warren

Two weeks ago, I wrote about grammatical moods and its three flavors, indicative, subjunctive, and imperative. The indicative and imperative moods are semantically pretty straightforward, but the subjunctive is fraught with subtlety and peril. The Gentle Reader may recall that the subjunctive mood is used to indicate that a statement represents a potential rather than a real condition. The following three statements illustrate the differences of the three moods:

“You are going to the store.” — Indicative, i.e., a statement of fact.
“Go to the store.” — Imperative, i.e., a command.
“You might go to the store.” — Subjunctive, i.e., a possibility.

So far so good. One of the most common characteristics of the subjunctive is the presence of a modal auxiliary verb: can, will, shall, may, must, might, could, would, should, ought.

So consider the following two statements, both in the subjunctive mood:

1. “You might go to the store.”
2. “You may go to the store.”

Historically, the word might is simply the past tense of may. But something very interesting is going on here: both of the above statements predicate a condition in the here and now; they are both present tense. But by altering the tense of the modal auxiliary, they differ not in time, but in condition. Sentence one indicates that going to the store is a possible alternative, but sentence two can be read as giving permission to go the store. There’s something else going on here, too—the use of the present tense (“may”) makes the possibility of going to the store more likely and less remote than the past tense does. It may not be all that obvious, so let’s change the modal auxiliary from may to can:

3. “You could go to the store.”
4. “You can go to the store.”

Now the past tense (“could”) indicates that going to the store is among the places you might go to, but the present tense (“can”) indicates that you have the ability to go to the store if you so choose. Still a little hazy? Let’s switch the statements from positive to negative:

5. “You couldn’t go to the store.”
6. “You can’t go to the store.”

Now you clearly can see how much more forceful the present tense in sentence 6 is compared to the past tense in sentence 5. In sentence 5, the past tense leaves open the possibility of going to the store—you won’t go to the store unless some reason compels you to. But in sentence 6, going to the store is out of the question altogether.

Remember last week when I pointed out that there are two kinds of subjunctive, the mandative and the formulaic? You may recall that the formulaic subjunctive is an expression of will. The alteration of the modal auxiliary tense has a specific effect on the impact of how likely the statement is conceived. Curme puts it this way: “ … a present tense form [indicates] hope of fulfillment; a past tense form [indicates] little or no hope of fulfillment.” He goes on: “We frequently avoid a blunt expression of will by using a past tense form of the subjunctive, thus indicating that we do not count on the fulfillment of our wish.”

This is an important point, and it goes beyond coloring within subjunctive forms themselves. The subjunctive, by way of expressing potentials instead of realities, is also weaker than the indicative—and therefore less blunt. Because it is less blunt, it is often seen as being genteel and polite. Circumspection, after all, is always more polite than being direct. And politesse is a sign of superior upbringing. It can therefore be used as a form of false modesty.

Remember my boss from Barnes & Noble?

CUSTOMER: Where is the cookbook section?
MANAGER: That would be on the second floor, to the left of the escalator.

The direct question deserves a direct answer. But my boss used the subjunctive because she thought it made her sound more upscale. She was being unnecessarily polite, letting the customer know that she was shopping in an upscale store instead of the Target book section. It’s ironic, although I’m sure my boss didn’t see it that way.

This circumlocution for the sake of politeness once got me into a little bit of trouble. When I was a Lieutenant (junior grade) in the USN, I was standing watch on the bridge of my ship when I saw what I thought was an “enemy” ship on the horizon. (We were in the middle of an exercise.) I called the Captain to let him know. He asked me for a recommendation.

ME: I would recommend going to General Quarters, sir.
CAPTAIN: Very well.

The expression “very well” in Navalese is the standard response of a senior to a junior on being informed of something, indicating that the senior understands the communication—the Navalese expression going the other way, from junior to senior, is “Aye, sir” (or in the Royal Navy, if the junior is an officer, “Very good, sir.”). But “very well” is also an expression of assent.

ME: Request permission to go to General Quarters.
CAPTAIN: Very well.

Well, as soon as I hung up on the Captain, I called the ship to GQ. It turned out that the ship on the horizon was a friendly after all, and that we had been expecting to rendezvous with it. (I had been improperly briefed before taking the watch and knew nothing of this.) As a consequence, I got everybody in a lather for no reason at all, including the embarked Fleet Commander’s staff, and the three-star Fleet Commander himself, not to mention everybody who was asleep in their racks and staterooms at the time, and the Captain was furious that I had jumped the gun.

ME: But sir, you said, “Very well” when I said I would recommend going to GQ.
CAPTAIN: You said that you WOULD recommend going to GQ. You didn’t actually recommend it, and I didn’t approve it.

Oops.

You’re probably thinking that the Captain was stretching a point. But I know he wasn’t, even though we didn’t really get along very well, he being a particularly tough son of a bitch. (To be fair, though, he was the CO who qualified me as a Surface Warfare Officer—hence the illustration above, the “water wings” pin of a SWO, the blackshoe’s equivalent to an aviator’s wings or a submariner’s dolphins—one of the proudest achievements in my life, and I was the only officer he permanently qualified in his entire career, so in the balance, I came out ahead.)

We also have certain subjunctive idioms in English. An idiom, you may recall, is “a form of expression, grammatical construction, phrase, etc., peculiar to a language … often having a signification other than its grammatical or logical one.” (OED)

Here are a few of them:

7. You had better change the channel.
8. On the whole, I’d rather be in Philadelphia.
9. You have got to be kidding.
10. John is to write our column on Saturdays.

We all know what these sentences mean, but if you parse them literally, they’re a wee bit … strange.

Number 7 admonishes the person it’s addressed to into an action, but the construction has an auxiliary usually used in pluperfect tense (“had”), an intensifier (“better”), and then a present tense verb. How does that logically make it into a recommendation? Well, it isn’t logical. It’s an idiom.

Sentence 8 uses the word “rather” in an idiomatic sense indicating preference—it’s usually an intensifier itself, as in “That’s rather peculiar.” (“Rather” has a fascinating etymology, by the way, originally being a form of an Old English adjective, rathe, meaning quick, and indicated something occurring previously in time to something else, i.e., a synonym for prior.)

Sentence 9 is interesting, because usually, “have got” is identical with simply “have” as far as possession is concerned: “I have the flu” and “I’ve got the flu” mean the same thing. But here, “have got” has an imperative sense, and the sentence means the same thing as “You must be kidding.” It does this by preceding an infinitive: “have got to [verb]”.

Likewise, sentence 10 uses a copula (“is”) to tie the subject to an infinitive, and comes out meaning the same thing as “John will write our column on Saturdays”, which in the first place is a finite construction. In the second place, the copula does not usually connote an act of volition—it generally simply ascribes some condition to the subject: “John is a gentleman”, or “John is writing.”

If you translated any of these sentences into another language word for word, it would come out utter nonsense. Another example of the wild and wonderful world of mood in English grammar.

So you see, mood matters. As I said at the outset, it’s a particularly complex topic and I’ve barely scratched the surface, but that’s why it deserves a dedicated scrutiny. Anybody who has a decent command over mood is capable of very subtle and shaded discourse. It’s a particularly useful weapon in our arsenal of words, and its effective application is one of the things that separates the brilliant writer from the pedestrian one.

I would recommend it.