Thus:

If I were ten years younger, I'd marry her in a heartbeat.

vs.

If I was not going to make it into the office, I would always call in.

My point precisely - this is now considered acceptable usage even though a
mere few years back this should have been:

If I weren't going to make it into the office, I would always call in.

No, actually this would never have been technically correct, unless I
actually thought that I would never miss a day at the office. As I said,
the subjunctive is to be used in this case for suppositions contrary to fact.
If the clause describes a situation that could well occur, the indicative
mood is to be used. See Fowler's "Modern English Usage" and the
"New York Public Library Writer's Guide to Style and Usage "

Now it is the case that as English continues to evolve from a synthetic
language to an analytic one, more and more of these nuances are
gradually disappearing. Fowler, indeed, writing in "The King's English"
at the turn of the last century, thought that the subjunctive might well
vanish in the course of a single generation, and one can certainly find
numerous examples from contemporary writers where its use has been
superseded by the ubiquitous indicative, as well as, alas, examples where
some variation of the subjunctive has been employed improperly. Still, as
long as we can make these distinctions, curmudgeons like myself will do so.

Reid Carson
rcarson@rcarson.com



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