Mind your language
It is not fair to blame the Americans for every element of speech that we don’t like, but there are a couple of pieces of syntax that have blown like some New World bacterium over our islands and have grown on the blank petri dishes of the English mind. (I was going to say ‘like avian influenza’, but my husband tells me that bird flu is a virus and viruses don’t grow in petri dishes.) One of them is the construction exemplified thus: ‘It is to his own benefit that he [should] understand how to mend the car.’ The word should does not always occur, and the general supposition is that understand is a subjunctive. In British English, the thought would be more normally clothed in the construction: ‘It is to his own benefit for him to understand how to mend the car.’ A similar importation of modal verb forms is often to be heard when Americans, and now British people, deliver conditional statements (using the word if). Take the British English form: ‘I would have delivered it on Friday, if you had asked me.’ There the conditional form of the verb (‘I would have delivered’) appears in the half of the construction called the apodosis. The clump of words (‘I would have delivered’) does what in Latin would be accomplished by a variant termination of the verb; but English has become inflexionally enfeebled and does the same work by calling in auxiliary verbs. In the other half of the sentence (the protasis), there is merely a shift in tense.
What the wicked Americans do is to shove a conditional form of the verb in both halves, the protasis as well as the apodosis, thus: ‘I would have delivered it on Friday, if you would have asked me.’ Bananas. It ain’t English, but it is becoming so.
I am not sure what we can do to stop the spread of these syntactic germs. Nothing, I fear, except wait for a change in the weather. I had thought, as I mentioned only recently, that the plaguey word situation, which 25 years ago was in a totally out of control situation, had been eradicated by such a climatic change. But it popped up in an impertinent letter from a medical insurance management company to my husband, conjuring him to keep his professional fees down lest the patient experience an insurance ‘shortfall situation’. In other words, the company was threatening not to cough up if he charged any more than the supermarket one-truss-fits-all rate. We must keep the situation situation under careful observation.
Dot Wordsworth
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