may/might confusion

[RonButters at AOL.COM]

In a message dated 1/16/2002 7:49:19 PM, sagehen at WESTELCOM.COM writes:

<< AG Ashcroft suffers from this increasingly common complaint, causing him to
say, absurdly, that " had not the other passengers" aboard the plane
prevented his doing so, the would-be shoe-bomber "MAY have succeeded in
bringing down the plane".....
To which I say, had anyone not familiar with this story been relying on
Ashcroft's description for their understanding, they MIGHT well have been
pretty confused about the outcome.
A. Murie >>

There has been a lot written about the merger of MAY and MIGHT, but for many
people this seems to be a done deal. I know, it is hard to understand how a
distinction that seems so natural and clear to ME simply does not register
with most educated Americans under the age of 45 or so (and even older in the
case of such folks as Ashcroft). I don't even remember, as a youth, having
had anyone point out to me that there was such a distinction--it seems to me
to have always been a part of my linguistic "competence." So my gut reaction
is that this is not something like the prescriptivist SHALL/WILL distinction,
which has been preserved largely only in textbooks (but cf. "Shall I
castigate the evil doers?" vs. "Will I castigate the evil doers?"); there is
really a linguistic change in progress here, and it is inevitable and well on
its way to completion. MAY is replacing MIGHT in virtually all environments,
though MIGHT still exists for such speakers as a free variant in some
environments.

I think this is a linguistic change that is at least as important as the
extension of invariant BE, though it is scarcely mentioned in the
sociolinguistic literature.