Subscribe to RSS 2.0Imaginary Conversation (updated)
Child: I wish I was a teacher
Teacher: That's not correct English. You should say 'were' not 'was'.
Child: Why?
Teacher: That's the rule in Standard English. And using Standard English helps us all understand one another more easily.
Child: But everyone says it the way I just did.
Teacher: Not everyone. Some people still use the correct form. The point is that it's easier to communicate if we all follow the rules.
Child: So what's the rule I should be following?
Teacher: Well, in English the subjunctive isn't grammaticalised so you don't inflect the verb to agree with the subject the same way that you do with the indicative mood. Instead we use modal auxiliaries coupled with fixed inflections of the main verb. In the past tense, the non-past plural form is used, whereas in the present the verb is not inflected at all.
Child: Where did you learn that rule?
Teacher: In college.
Child: So only ten more years and I can talk like you just did and then everyone will understand me? I'm not sure I wish I were a teacher anymore.
Updated
Thanks to Mark below for contributing such an appealing reminiscence. And without wishing to be too ageist, I'm rather impressed that someone educated in the 30s is commenting on new-fangled Internet-blogs in the, um, well, whatever we end up calling this decade*. I would only quibble with your old English teacher on one point and that is his dislike of 'finish up'. I have some sympathy with the American practice of adding that particular preposition. 'Finish' can seem a bit naked if it doesn't have an object and giving it a preposition to work with does feel a bit more satisfying. 'What did you finish?' 'I finished up'. That sort of appeals to me.
And as for Katherine's comment: now I can't add in the missing period without either deleting your comment or making you seem deluded, neither of which seem very polite, so I'll have to leave my omissions on public display.
*I've said it before, but won't someone please name this and the next decade sooooon. Pleeease!
Comments: 4
The first sentence doesn't have a period at the end of it, either. :D
Posted by: KatharineC on September 5, 2007 01:49 PM
Brilliant. Especially as I studied English Language at college!
Posted by: hellojed on September 5, 2007 04:33 PM
When I was in school in the 1930s, my history teacher taught me a list of dates and my geography teacher taught me a list of place names. Mr Brown, my English teacher, brought them to life by teaching me that the dates recorded good, bad and even humdrum events in the timeline of history while place names meant that somewhere out there, there were mountains, rivers, seas, towns, villages, and people I could visit and hopefully befriend. All very forward looking in the days of Bulldog Drummond and Johnny Foreigner beginning at Calais.
Mr Brown – in those days teachers had no first names – taught me not to finish things up. I might as well finish them down or sideways. His maxims were never to use a shilling word where a sixpenny one will do and rather than use clichés to describe a road accident or a carthorse tossing its head back to catch the last content of its feedbag, find my own way of describing what I’d seen and heard.
Faced as he was by anything up to thirty thumb sucking, pencil chewing, desk lid banging, coughing, scratching, sneezing, and fidgeting schoolboys, one phrase he could never escape was the one that gave rise to his nickname.
‘If only…’ he began to the first class he ever addressed. ‘Phoney’ is what they heard above the hubbub and Phoney Brown was born.
‘Rickman,’ Phoney once said to me,‘do sit up boy. You can’t possibly think in that position.’
‘Sir, Sir! Rickman can’t think in any position,’ bellowed my neighbour. The ensuing scuffle became a matter of honour. Vague threats were uttered after we were separated and sent to the back of the class where we were both too short sighted to see the blackboard and Phoney was too short sighted to see the surreptitious ankle kicking that went on for the rest of the period.
Apart from the unfortunate time I tried to correct my mother when she told me to finish my greens up, I have never forgotten Mr Brown. Or the love of language he did his best to instil in his class.
Posted by: Mark Rickman on September 6, 2007 03:34 PM
Fooled yoooou!
I call this decade "the oh-oh's" or 00's in print. The next one is the teens, isn't it?
Posted by: KatharineC on September 7, 2007 01:18 PM