By Expressions, Subjunctives

Hello Mr P You (and Marv have) talked a lot about ! When I was in school, teachers taught us to use with a statement in subjunctive mood. Indeed Fowler wrote so in his "The King's English" a century ago, and still now OED seems to defy any use of . But language changes with time and so the ....

Thanks CJ for your answer, I'm glad that you FEEL the verb "learnt" as a subjunctive because I have been taught that after the expressions "it's hight time", "it's about time", "as if/though", "if only", "would rather/sooner" and "wish" we needed the subjunctive mood. So you can understand how...

- (The choice was his alone.) If he is saying, "Not that I would but if did, then this would happen". "If I open the door, a tiger will ..." is allowing that it is a more real chance. Even a mixed conditional is possible, "If I open the door, a tiger would ..."

Hello MrM Thank you for the nice info. Reading the article I got curious about how come the construction "had rather X" came into English and studied it through OED. What I learned is as follows; 1) In English there are many similar expressions. They can be all represented by a construct: ...

http://www.bartleby.com/64/C001/061.html The present subjunctive is most familiar to us in formulaic expressions such as God help him, be that as it may, come what may, and suffice it to say. It also occurs in that clauses used to state commands or to express intentions or necessity: We...

On a webqite I read that we can say "It's high time we SEND (and not SENT) him a registered letter." whether with the expression "it's about time" we can only use the subjunctive = "It's about time you SPENT (and not SPEND) a little less money." Is this true ? Here the explanation the person...

Given the state of the roads I will have to drive on, I would rather RENT a car than BORROW theirs. Fine. Having discovered the states of the roads we drove on, they would rather we HAD RENTED a car than BORROWED theirs. Oof! It's OK as is, but personally, I don't use this construction. ...

Dear teachers, On a webqite I read that we can say "It's high time we SEND (and not SENT) him a registered letter." whether with the expression "it's about time" we can only use the subjunctive = "It's about time you SPENT (and not SPEND) a little less money." Is this true ? Here the...

We've done this before, Hela-- none of your sentences is subjunctive: I. There are two forms of the subjunctive, called present and past. -- The present subjunctive in all persons is 'be' for the verb 'to be', and the base form for all other verbs. Thus: ---- They demand (that) I be...

Hi. I was wondering about something my teacher corrected in a test exam I had; the expression "need not be." I wrote: "This need not be", and it was corrected to "This needs not be". I was just curious whether this is correct, because I have seen many examples of both versions. I thought that in...