Why subjunctive?

[Ronald Butters]

If Wilson and I agree, the rest of you must be wrong.


On Aug 12, 2010, at 7:19 PM, Wilson Gray wrote:

> On Thu, Aug 12, 2010 at 3:09 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:
>
>> the prescriptive edict
>
> There's a prescriptive edict WRT this? Who knew? Grammar has really
> passed me by. IAC, I've always used intuition, irregardless of whether
> it be prescriptively or idiomatically correct, in the opinion of
> others.
>
> FWIW, in this case, I agree with Ron, for no more essential reason
> than that what he says is, IMO, "correct," whatever that word may mean
> in the context of a discussion of the description of a living language
> by its native speakers. Perhaps, "This is what *I* prefer, but I don't
> have a problem with *your* preference to have it be some other way."
> Unless you be working class, poor, immigrant or otherwise lacking
> command of the "standard" language, of course. The purity of our noble
> native tongue, sufficient unto the needs of Chaucer, Shakespeare, and
> Dubya must be preserved.
>
> As the last is reputed to have observed (here, I depend upon my own
> translation of an unknown-to?/by?-me English original that had been
> translated into Spanish):
>
> "Most of America's imports come from overseas."
>
> That's true on several - or should that be, "so many"? - levels.
>
> -Wilson
> --
> -Wilson
> –––
> All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"––a strange complaint to
> come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
> –Mark Twain
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org