Before or After? (image courtesy Wikimedia Foundation)
Spot the mistake in this sentence:
“It is vitally important that the community hall has a new roof.”
Answer:
We don’t know whether the community hall desperately needs a new roof, or already has a new roof. If it still needs the new roof, the form should be:
“It is vitally important that the community hall HAVE a new roof.”
OR
“It is vitally important that the community hall SHOULD HAVE a new roof.”
What’s going on here?
Historically, expressions that conveyed suggesting, demanding or necessity were followed by a subjunctive verb: “I demand that he HAND it over,” not “I demand that he hands it over.” Yeah, it probably sounds fussy and pedantic, and maybe reminds you of something you learned in Latin. But the fact is that it can still help to make the meaning clearer.
So what’s a subjunctive anyway?
Verbs tend to come in three main flavours or “moods”:
Indicative – This is the usual mood: a statement about how things are
Imperative – An instruction or command (e.g. “Hand it over!”)
Subjunctive – A statement about how things should be, or how we would like them to be
Simplistically speaking, you create a subjunctive verb by lopping the S off the end of singular verbs, or changing singular irregular verbs to what looks like the plural. So we have “It is essential that he GIVE (not gives) me some money,” and “It is vital that he HAVE (not has) his membership withdrawn.”
And I’m seriously suggesting you should use this?
OK, no. If you’re worried about sounding like an eighteenth century linguistic pedant, you can use an auxiliary verb instead: “It is vital that he SHOULD HAVE his membership withdrawn.” This skirts the issue and still makes the point. All I’m suggesting is that anyone using expressions involving necessity, intent and so on make (not makes!) the meaning crystal clear.
The Americans have this nailed
It seems that American speakers are more comfortable with subjunctives than the British, and can actually feel it awkward if someone uses the indicative mood when a subjunctive is required. I salute them!
A final word
You might think this post is about splitting the finest of hairs, but I’ve often heard snatches of news reporting where I genuinely didn’t know whether the speaker was expressing desire for something to happen or gratitude that it had happened already. And that’s not clever.
Oh, and …
“Be it so”, the title of this piece, is apparently a rather archaic direct subjunctive form, which in modern usage would be translated into “Let it be”. And that, as I’m sure you didn’t want to know, is a third-person imperative.
Author’s note
As you can see, I’m an unrepentant lifelong pedant, but insistence on correctness has helped me immeasurably with my writing, and I can’t be so different from everyone else. So I’ve decided to share a few insights here in a vainglorious attempt to make the world a more comprehensible place.
If you’d like to suggest any other grammatical howlers that I could expose, please leave a comment or drop me a note here. I’d love to hear from you.
And you can decide for yourself whether I live up to my own tenets by checking out my novels. See peterrowlands.com.
