CORRECT GRAMMAR

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Which is correct, I will treat your house as if it were my own. Or I will treat your house as if it was my own.

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Type: Question • Score: 0 • Views: 1,724 • Replies: 15

[+4] - fresco - 05/03/2009"as if" usually takes the subjunctive "were".

@thargens,

"as if" usually takes the subjunctive "were".

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@thargens,

WERE MY OWN.

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That's right.

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@thargens,

Quote:

Which is correct, I will treat your house as if it were my own. Or I will treat your house as if it was my own.

They are both correct, thargens and both are in common use. Using the subjunctive form 'were' is a more formal collocation.

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@JTT,

Yo, JTT, on TV here the football (soccer) pundits (Scottish usually, unlettered but handy with a ball at their feet) say things like "The boy done great".

Everyone knows what they mean. Does that make it right?

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Sure do.

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Hey, McTag, why do they sound like they're from Georgia? (our Georgia, not the one over by Russia)

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@MontereyJack,

I'm genuinely puzzled by JTT's "if some people say it, it's equally valid" approach.

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It's the old conflict between prescriptive grammarians versus descriptive grammarians, maybe somewhat different in the States vs. Britain. The subjunctive is, I gather, used much less over here, and a lot of people seem to see it as kind of fuddy-duddy and old-fashioned.

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Well, if it were up to me . . .

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@McTag,

It has nothing to do with right or wrong, McTag. It has everything to do with register.

The subjunctive in English is moribund. I gather that you have no problem using the subjunctive mood in all other manner with no subjunctive form, as in,

If I had gone to London, I would have looked up McTag.

OR

If I lived in Singapore, I'd have to smuggle in chewing gum.

In the English of today, the past tense form suffices to create the present subjunctive.

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@MontereyJack,

Quote:

It's the old conflict between prescriptive grammarians versus descriptive grammarians, ...

It's quiiiiiiite a stretch to call prescriptivists grammarians, MontereyJack.

Quote:

The Decline of Grammar

G Nunberg

...

Most of my fellow linguists, in fact, would say that it is absurd even to talk about a language changing for the better or the worse. When you have the historical picture before you, and can see how Indo-European gradually slipped into Germanic, Germanic into Anglo-Saxon, and Anglo-Saxon into the English of Chaucer, then Shakespeare, and then Henry James, the process of linguistic change seems as ineluctable and impersonal as continental drift. From this Olympian point of view, not even the Norman invasion had much of an effect on the structure of the language, and all the tirades of all the grammarians since the Renaissance sound like the prattlings of landscape gardeners who hope by frantic efforts to keep Alaska from bumping into Asia.

http://www.pbs.org/speak/speech/correct/decline/

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@Setanta,

Quote:

Well, if it were up to me . . .

Mercifully, it isn't.

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@McTag,

Quote:

Yo, JTT, on TV here the football (soccer) pundits (Scottish usually, unlettered but handy with a ball at their feet) say things like "The boy done great".

Everyone knows what they mean. Does that make it right?

Does that make Yo "right", McTag?

You're fighting a losing battle, not to mention a particularly hypocritical one with the "right/wrong" labelling.

The collocation above is simply nonstandard. There's a decided difference between nonstandard/standard and right/wrong. The latter is beset with all sorts of difficulty sorting it all out.

If it's simply a matter of "right" language belonging to the current group in power, then clearly BrE, [AuE, NzE, etc.] has had its day and y'all better get on back to school for some serious retraining.

It's always been the case that the unlettered know their own dialect better than all these prescriptivists who have made so many egregious errors analyzing language over the centuries.

Think about it for a second. What's the proof for prescriptions? "Well, it's just so" or "'Cause my granny/teacher/mom told me so"... .

1 Reply

@JTT,

I agree with most of that. I'm all for informality when not inappropriate.

We've got to decide (especially when attempting to answer a serious and well-meant question) what register we wish to use.

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CORRECT GRAMMAR

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