A Word, Please: How to set the right subjunctive mood

Imagine you’re in a casual conversation talking about the meetings of some organization where sometimes the agenda was exciting and other times not. Do you think this wording would be OK?

“If there was nothing major going on, the commissioners might spend time ruminating about the effects of something like an African civil war on coffee prices.”

The part of the sentence I’m focusing on is the third word, “was.” I suspect this would come naturally to most English speakers. That’s certainly how I would say it. But that’s not how either author David Enrich or his editors put it in “The Spider Network: The Wild Story of a Math Genius, a Gang of Backstabbing Bankers, and One of the Greatest Scams in Financial History.” Instead, they chose “If there were nothing major going on.”

No doubt, he or they were trying to follow rules for the subjunctive mood — a set of practices we English speakers use regularly whether we realize it or not. But it seems to me this is another case of trying too hard to use proper English and, as a result, using less-than-proper English.

The “subjunctive mood” refers to contrary-to-fact sentences like wishes, suppositions, and statements of necessity, affecting how we conjugate the verb in those sentences. And though this may sound unfamiliar to you, you actually understand the subjunctive better than you realize.

Think about the examples “If I were a rich man” and “I was a rich man.” The first deals with a hypothetical — a statement contrary to fact. The second refers to a time when the speaker actually was rich. Fluent English speakers know that both of these are correct even if they’ve never heard the term subjunctive mood.

The subjunctive is one of four “moods” in English. Indicative, interrogative and imperative moods complete the set. Indicative means a simple statement. “I am a rich man.” Interrogative means a question: “Am I a rich man?” Imperatives are commands: “Be rich, man!” Subjunctive, which applies in statements contrary to fact, includes structures like “I wish I were” and, when hypothetical, “If I were.” It also includes demands, like “I demand that he give me an apology,” and statements of necessity, like “It’s crucial that he give me an apology.”

The most common uses of the subjunctive are visible only as applied to one verb, “be,” and only when it’s in the past tense form “was,” which gets changed to “were” in contrary-to-fact sentences. For example, “Carl was here” changes its verb form in “I wish Carl were here.” Sometimes the difference between indicative and subjunctive is invisible: “Carl and Kelly were here.” “I wish Carl and Kelly were here.” That’s because plural subjects already call for “were.”

In the present tense, the subjunctive works a little differently. For one thing, it applies to all verbs, not just “was.” And it has its own formula: Replace the conjugated verb with the “base form” of the verb, which is the same as the infinitive. Compare “Randolph is here” with “It’s crucial that Randolph be here.” The first uses a regular conjugation of the verb “be,” in this case “is.” But because the second sentence is in the subjunctive mood, we don’t conjugate “be.” Instead, we use it in its base form. Another example: In “He listens to his teacher,” the verb is conjugated to go with the subject. But in “It’s important that he listen to his teacher,” we use the base form of the verb, “listen.”

The sentence from the Enrich book (which, by the way, I recommend) wasn’t talking about a situation contrary to fact. It didn’t use “if” to hypothesize about things that didn’t happen. Instead, it used “if” to mean “at the times when” something major was going on at the meetings, which no doubt was sometimes the case. So my take is that the sentence was not subjunctive and the editors should have used “was” instead of “were.”

— June Casagrande is the author of “The Best Punctuation Book, Period.” She can be reached at JuneTCN@aol.com.