Q: I have noticed the absence of the subjunctive in lines from recent shows and movies. Have you?
A: The English subjunctive has been gradually disappearing since Anglo-Saxon days, with ups and downs along the way, but it hasn’t disappeared yet. In fact, it’s quite easy to find recent examples from Broadway to Hollywood. Here are two that use “were” subjunctively to express hypothetical situations.
In the current Broadway comedy Oh, Mary!, Abe Lincoln is shocked that his wife wants to become a cabaret star: “How would it look if the First Lady of the United States were to do a cabaret act while the country is at war?!” Her response: “Sensational!”
And in the 2026 Hollywood comedy thriller They Will Kill You, the character Asia Reaves delivers this warning line to the leader of a satanic cult: “If I were you, I’d clear out.”
In Old English (spoken from roughly 450 to 1150), the subjunctive mood had distinct verb endings. It expressed wishes, requests, possibilities, doubts, and hypothetical situations, as it does in contemporary English.
In this example from an Old English version of the Lord’s Prayer in the West Saxon Gospels, the first word (si) is the present subjunctive of the verb beon (to be): “Si þin nama gehalgod” (“Be thine name hallowed”).
English lost its verb endings for the subjunctive, as well as the indicative and imperative moods, during the transitional period from Old English to Middle English—roughly from the 11th to the 13th centuries. In place of the verb endings, the subjunctive was usually expressed with “be,” “were,” and the bare, or “to”-less, infinitives of other verbs.
In this Middle English example, Chaucer uses the bare infinitive “save” subjunctively in referring to a company of pilgrims: “And God save al this faire compaignye” (from The Knight’s Tale in The Canterbury Tales, circa 1385).
In late Middle English, writers began replacing the subjunctive with expressions using modal auxiliary verbs such as “may,” “might,” “shall,” and “should.” Here’s an example with “should” and “might” from a Jan. 30, 1453, letter by Margaret Paston to her husband, John Paston:
“ye shuld yeve þe jantylman þat ye know of seche langage as he myght fele by yow þat ye wull be wele willyng” (“you should give the gentleman that you know of such language as he might tell by you that you will be well willing”). From Paston Letters and Papers of the Fifteenth Century, Part I (1971).
In early Modern English, Shakespeare used both the subjunctive and modal auxiliaries to express wishes, doubts, possibilities, and so on. He uses the subjunctive “were” as well as the modals “might” and “would” in Act 1, Scene 7 of Macbeth. We’re citing here from the First Folio, 1623:
“If it were done, when ’tis done, then ’twer well, It were done quickly,” Macbeth says, and later adds, “that but this blow Might be the be all, and the end all. Heere, But heere, vpon this Banke and Schoole [shoal] of time, Wee’ld iumpe [jump] the life to come.”
The use of the subjunctive has continued to decline in Modern English in favor of modal auxiliaries, but it has declined much less in the US than in the UK since the late 19th century.
For example, linguists say the use of “were” as the past, or irealis, subjunctive to express hypothetical situations (as in “I wish I were rich”) is much more common in American English than in British English.
And linguists have reported an increase in the use of the mandative subjunctive in the US to express requests or demands (as in “She insists that I be on time tomorrow”). That use has apparently influenced a lesser increase in the UK, according to linguists.
Getting back to your question, we haven’t noticed a recent absence or significant decrease in the use of the subjunctive in English.
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