Category: Grammar

Q: I was listening to Pat on WNYC when a caller wondered why some Americans say “this here” and “that there” instead of “this” and “that.” I think this usage may have originated among immigrants from Sweden, since the demonstrative pronouns in Swedish are parallel: den här and det här (sing.), de där (pl.).

A: In English, noun phrases like “this here dog” and “that there cat” are considered substandard. That’s because the demonstrative adjectives “this/these” and “that/those” already carry with them the notions of “here” or “there.”

“This” and “these” imply nearness to the speaker, so the “here” element is already built in. “That” and “those” imply distance from the speaker, so the “there” element is built in.

Linguists sometimes refer to one of those sets of demonstratives as “proximal” (near in space or time), and the other as “distal” (distant).

So in English, the phrases “this here dog” and “that there cat” are redundant; the spatial adverbs “here” and “there” are unnecessary. In fact, such phrases sound uneducated or backwoodsy to speakers of standard English.

But what’s true of English isn’t universally true.

In the Scandinavian languages, as you point out, as well as in many others, demonstrative adjectives don’t work in precisely the same way they do in English.

That is, they don’t necessarily carry with them the notion of nearness or distance. So an adverbial equivalent of “here” or “there” wouldn’t be out of place.

However, we doubt that Americans who speak this way inherited the usage from their Scandinavian ancestors.

The English essayist and poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge complained in the mid-19th century that uneducated British speakers were committing the same misdemeanor.

In a treatise on grammar in the Encyclopaedia Metropolitana: Or, Universal Dictionary of Knowledge (1845), Coleridge criticized the redoubling of word elements “for the sake of emphasis, which is a habit common to barbarous nations, and to the illiterate in all countries.”

And he meant all countries. Coleridge didn’t exempt the English, grumbling that “our own rustics commonly say this here, that there.” This usage (at least in English) is still considered rustic today.

As Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage says: “Our evidence from published sources shows that writers in general have no need to be told that this here and that there are something less than standard English.”

“The use of here and there for emphasis following a demonstrative adjective is a characteristic of dialectal and uneducated speech,” M-W continues. “It does not occur in writing except when such speech is being recorded, evoked, or imitated.”

We found an interesting discussion of this usage in a paper by the linguist Dorian Roehrs, published in 2010 in the Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics.

In the paper, “Demonstrative-Reinforcer Constructions,” Roehrs describes four different patterns in Germanic and Romance languages in which a demonstrative is accompanied by a “reinforcer” (usually an adverb equivalent to “here” or “there”).

As the author shows, these patterns (which vary in their word order) can be found in Yiddish, German, Pennsylvania German, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, Icelandic, Dutch, Afrikaans, French, Italian, Spanish, and Catalan.

It would seem that in this case, English is the odd man out. But good or bad, “this here” has been part of the language since at least as far back as the 14th century, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

The OED gives only two citations, one from around 1380 and one from 1762.

The later example, from Samuel Foote’s comedy The Orators, is a deliberate caricature, spoken by a blustering lawyer: “I should be glad to know, how my client can be try’d in this here manner.”

(A search of the play shows that the same character uses the phrases “that there manner,” “this here question,” “this here motion,” and “that there motion.”)

As the Oxford English Dictionary says within its entry for “this,” the use of the demonstrative adjective “strengthened by here immediately following” is “dial. [dialectal] or vulgar.”

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Listen to Pat and Bryan A. Garner duke it out on CBC Radio over the use of “hopefully” as a sentence adverb.

Q: Which of these two sentences is right? And why? (1) “He was the boy whose job was to plow the field.” (2) “He was the boy whose job it was to plow the field.” Many thanks for any help you can provide.

A: This is a very interesting question. The short answer is that both versions, with and without “it,” are acceptable. The longer answer—the why—is a bit more complicated.

In the final clauses of both sentences (the part beginning “whose job …”), the subject is “job,” the verb is “was,” and the object is the infinitive phrase “to plow the field.”

But in the second version, “it” has been added after “job.” In effect, the pronoun amounts to an extra subject, a doubling of the real one.

Within its entries for “it,” the Oxford English Dictionary says the pronoun is sometimes “used pleonastically after the noun subject.” (Pleonasm is the use of more words than are required.)

The extra (or pleonastic) “it” is especially common in archaic writings and in poetry—as in Shakespeare’s “For the rain it raineth every day,” sung by both the clown in Twelfth Night and the fool in King Lear.

Here’s where things get complicated. Despite its long history, today this usage is frowned upon in some cases and acceptable in others.

The use of an extra subject pronoun is now considered nonstandard in clauses like “my brother he said” or “her car it broke down.”

But the redundant “it” is still acceptable, even a bit literary sounding, in such constructions as “whose job it was to plow the field.”

In fact, we’ve noticed that this construction is especially common in clauses beginning with “whose,” where the verb is a form of “be” and the object is an infinitive phrase.

For example, “whose task it is to cut the budget,” “whose aim it was to start anew,” “whose duty it is to volunteer,” “whose purpose it was to topple the dictator,” “whose mandate it is to find a cure,” and so on.

No one frowns on usages like that, though “my brother he said” and “her car it broke down” raise a lot of eyebrows.

Why? We don’t know, but the construction with the infinitive phrase somehow managed to survive from older English with its reputation intact while the others lost respectability along the way.

In the acceptable usages we mentioned, the pronoun “it” is certainly not necessary. It seems to be added either for emphasis or for some other rhetorical purpose—for instance, variety or rhythm.

We say this because sometimes good writers will use such phrases both with and without the extra “it” in the same passage. We’ll cite a couple of examples, highlighting the phrases in boldface italics.

From Julie Salamon’s novel White Lies (1987):

“Jamaica at times played the worldly younger sister, whose job was to keep her cloistered, somewhat academic doctor-sister in touch with the goings on in the big world out there. … Geneva would become the wise commentator, whose job it was to press a mirror to her sister’s face and force her to acknowledge the presence of an adult on the glistening surface.”

From the memoir Stolen Lives (2001), by Malika Oufkir and Michéle Fitoussi:

“Then came the housekeepers, whose job was to supervise the running of the Palace and to maintain the traditions that the King valued. Muhammad V had a concubine whose job it was, on feast days, to dress him in his ceremonial costume, a white jellabah and trousers.”

The extra “it” alters the rhythm and avoids the monotony of having “whose job was” appear twice within the same passage.

Notice that in all these cases, the object of the verb “be” is an infinitive phrase: “was to keep her … sister,” “was to press a mirror,” “was to supervise the running,” and so on.

There’s yet another kind of optional “it” construction, one that creates a double object instead of a double subject. This one, too, is considered idiomatic rather than incorrect.

Here the optional “it” immediately follows the verb and precedes clauses beginning with “that.” We’ll invent a couple of examples: “I regret [it] that you took offense at my email” … “Mom resents [it] that you took the car without asking.”

The “it” in such sentences, according to The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, “can be omitted without any apparent change in meaning.”

Similarly, “it” can be used or omitted in certain idiomatic phrases. The examples in the Cambridge Grammar include “This brought [it] home to us that we were in great danger” and “He had taken [it] for granted that he would be given a second chance.”

But sometimes the “it” can be omitted only if the clauses are reversed.

The Cambridge Grammar says, for example, that “it” is required here: “We owe it to you that we got off so lightly.” But in reverse, the “it” is dropped: “That we got off so lightly we owe to you.”

Sorry we can’t be more enlightening, but we hope this helps.

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Q: In a book I’m reading, a character says, “Let’s begin the chase, you and I.” This sounds correct, at least to me, but analyzing the line got me thinking that maybe it should be “you and me.” In my own writing, which should I use?

A: In spoken English, “let’s” (or “let us”) is often followed by either “you and I” or “you and me”—with or without words and punctuation between the two parts.

Is one version better than the other? Not really. The case of the accompanying pronouns—nominative “you and I” or objective “you and me”—doesn’t much matter.

This is because the “us” that’s part of the contraction “let’s” is all the pronoun you need, strictly speaking.

So adding either “you and I” or “you and me” is technically redundant—similar to adding “us” and creating the pronoun-heavy “let’s us.”

So arguments about the “correct” grammatical case here are pointless. We’re talking about idiomatic, colloquial expressions that are common and generally acceptable in speech.

“Let’s you and I” and “let’s you and me” are seldom found in written English, except in writing that’s reproducing speech, like that of the character in the book you mentioned.

Now for a little historical perspective.

The contraction “let’s” has been around since at least as far back as Elizabethan times. Shakespeare used it hundreds of times in his plays, including King Henry VI, Part II, with its famous line “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.”

Generally, the verb “let” is used with pronouns in the objective case: “let me,” “let us,” “let him,” and so on.

But over the years, “let” has occasionally been used with pronouns in the nominative case. The grammarian Otto Jespersen, in his Essentials of English Grammar, cites several examples, including this one from Byron: “Let He who made thee answer that.”

And in spoken English, “let’s” has been used with extra pronouns in both cases.

The Oxford English Dictionary labels “let’s you and me (or you and I, or us)” as a colloquial usage—that is, characteristic of spoken rather than written English—and calls it an “irregular phrase.”

Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage describes the construction as idiomatic and has this to say: “Let’s can also be followed by a pair of pronouns in either the nominative or the objective case; the constructions occur in both American and British English.”

The quotations that follow include examples in the nominative case (like “let’s you and I go together,” from Arthur Wing Pinero’s 1895 play The Benefit of the Doubt), and in the objective case (“Let’s you and me duck out of here,” from John D. MacDonald’s 1950 novel The Brass Cupcake).

We’ll also provide an example, though it doesn’t use the contraction: “Let us go then, you and I, / When the evening is spread out against the sky.” from T. S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915).

(Obviously, “you and I” rhymes with “sky.” But if the last word in the second line had been “sea,” who knows? Eliot might have written “you and me.”)

But back to Merriam-Webster’s and the “let’s” usages. It notes that these “are idiomatic constructions—no matter what the case of the pronoun—found almost exclusively in spoken English.”

“You can use whichever of them sounds right to you wherever you would use speech forms in writing,” M-W adds. “You will probably not need any of them in anything you write that is at all removed from speech.”

Perhaps what we ought to be asking is why speakers feel the need to add either pair—“you and I” or “you and me”—to “let’s” in the first place. (People never use “let’s we,” and “let’s us” is widely frowned upon.)

Some grammarians believe that “let’s” is treated here as a single unit rather than a contraction of “let us”—that is to say, the “us” is swallowed up.

Consequently, the speaker senses that “let’s” needs some propping up, and adds “you and me” or the slightly more formal-sounding “you and I.”

This would also account for the similar constructions “let’s both” and “let’s each,” as well as the even more propped-up “let’s both of us” and “let’s each of us.”

In all these “let’s” phrases, notice how the “us” represented by that ’s has almost disappeared.

A modern grammarian might say that “us” or ’s has been “desemanticized” or has experienced “semantic loss,” and thus requires additional information in the way of “lexical support.”

It’s been argued now and then that because the object pronoun “us” is part of the contraction, any propping up should be done with pronouns in a similar case. By this argument, “let’s you and me” is preferable to “let’s you and I.”

But in our opinion, that argument merely creates the illusion that “correctness” is possible (or even desirable) here. As the OED says, this is an “irregular phrase” no matter what the case.

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Q: I recently watched Man on Wire, a documentary about the man who walked on a tightrope between the Twin Towers in the ’70s. In the film, a police officer says “everybody was spellbound in the watching of it.” I was really struck by his eloquence and wondered what you thought of this type of construction.

A: Philippe Petit’s tightrope walk between the Twin Towers on Aug. 7, 1974, left spectators gaping.

One of them was Sgt. Charles Daniels of the Port Authority Police Department, who had been dispatched to arrest Petit. In the 2008 documentary Man on Wire, Daniels recalled the experience:

“I observed the tightrope ‘dancer’—because you couldn’t call him a ‘walker’—approximately halfway between the two towers. And upon seeing us he started to smile and laugh and he started going into a dancing routine on the high wire. And when he got to the building we asked him to get off the high wire but instead he turned around and ran back out into the middle. … He was bouncing up and down. … His feet were actually leaving the wire and then he would resettle back on the wire again. … Unbelievable really… everybody was spellbound in the watching of it.”

We’re quoting here from a PBS American Experience webpage.

Daniels’s phrase “spellbound in the watching of it” is indeed eloquent. This kind of construction isn’t heard that often, and its uncommonness makes it all the more poetic.

Here the word “watching” is a gerund, a verbal form used as a noun (as in “the watching was tiresome”).

Daniels of course meant that in watching the performance, everyone was spellbound. But to say “everybody was spellbound in the watching of it” was much more elegant.

We’ll use another example to illustrate how a gerund acts as a noun: “Lord Carnarvon searched long for Tut’s tomb and was overjoyed in the finding of it.” Note that “finding” could easily be replaced with the noun “discovery.”

We’ve written often on our blog before about gerunds, including postings in January and March of 2011.

Here are a few more examples of the same kind of construction: “The art of the cake is in the baking of it” … “The iron’s strength is in the forging of it” … “The pie was quick to make but the boys were quicker in the eating of it.”

And here’s one we didn’t invent: “The proof of the pudding, is in the eating of it,” from Tobias Smollett’s 1755 translation Cervantes’s Don Quixote.

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Q: As a mathematician (PhD), I’d like to take issue with the WNYC caller who said Leonard Lopate misused the word “equation” on the air. It’s true that in mathematics, an equation is an equality between two expressions involving at least one object that is unknown and must be found. The ideal situation occurs when only one object can actually be determined—the solution of the equation. However, an equation can have no solution, or many, even infinitely many solutions. On the other hand, “equation” has a quite different meaning in standard English, and I can attest that Leonard’s metaphorical use of the word was quite correct.

A: Thank you for setting the record straight. For readers of the blog who didn’t hear Pat’s appearance last month on the Leonard Lopate Show, here’s the story.

A caller to the show said Leonard used the word “equation” incorrectly. The caller insisted that it should be used in a non-mathematical sense only when referring to situations involving two equal things.

But as Leonard and Pat noted on the show, the term is commonly used in a broad, metaphorical sense as well as the more literal one.

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.) has as one of its definitions “a complex of variable elements or factors.” Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) has “a complex of variable factors.”

Some dictionaries allow even broader meanings. But first, a little history.

The noun “equation” came into English in the late 1300s from the Latin æquationem. The Latin noun was derived from the verb æquare (to make equal), which in turn came from the adjective æquus (equal).

As it happens, “equation” was used by astrologists long before mathematicians adopted the word.

In Middle English, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, its original meaning was “equal partition,” a reference to the astrological division of the heavens.

For example, “equations of houses” meant “the method of dividing the sphere equally into ‘houses’ for astrological purposes.”

Nearly 200 years later, in 1570, the mathematical sense of “equation”—that is, a “statement of equality”—was introduced.

And one of the senses of this definition, the OED says, is “a formula affirming the equivalence of two quantitative expressions, which are for this purpose connected by the sign =.”

A century later, more general uses of the word came along.

In astronomy, for example, “equation” meant “the action of adding to or subtracting from any result of observation or calculation such a quantity as will compensate for a known cause of irregularity or error.”

This is where the terms “personal equation” and “human equation” came from.

“Personal equation” was a phrase introduced by 19th-century astronomers, the OED says, and originally meant the correction required to account for inaccuracy on the part of the observer.

A variation on this theme, “human equation,” came along in the mid-20th century. Here are a couple of OED citations:

“The Oakland Bridge suffers from such a simple, unpredictable human equation as the preference of truck drivers to loaf on a ferry” (from a 1938 issue of Reader’s Digest).

“We must throw out the human equation as much as we can in our search to find an explanation for seeming aberrancies” (from Fredson T. Bowers’s book Bibliography and Textual Criticism, 1964).

Current standard dictionaries, as we said, have endorsed even wider metaphorical uses of “equation.”

The Collins English Dictionary includes these definitions: “a situation, esp one regarded as having a number of conflicting elements (‘what you want doesn’t come into the equation’)”; and “a situation or problem in which a number of factors need to be considered.”

The Macmillan Dictionary, in both the British and American editions, says “the equation” can mean “all the different aspects that you have to consider in a situation (‘In a choice between the use of rail and car, the question of cost will come into the equation’).”

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Q: It’s odd that Pat includes “look sharp” in Woe Is I among her examples of adverbs without “ly” endings. It strikes me that “look” here is an adjective, not an adverb.

A: The paragraph you refer to in Woe Is I is about the use of these “ly”-less adverbs, and it says:

“Adverbs can come with or without ly, and many, like slow and slowly, exist in both forms. Those without the tails are called ‘flat adverbs,’ and we use them all the time in phrases where they follow a verb: ‘sit tight,’ ‘go straight,’ ‘turn right,’ ‘work hard,’ ‘arrive late,’ ‘rest easy,’ ‘look sharp,’ ‘aim high,’ ‘play fair,’ ‘come close,’ and ‘think fast.’ Yes, straight, right, hard, and the rest are bona-fide adverbs and have been for many centuries.”

But “look sharp” may or may not belong with those other phrases, depending on how it’s used.

If it’s being used in the sense of “watch out”—that is, “look sharply”—then “sharp” is indeed a flat adverb.

If it’s being used in the sense of “be quick” or “look alive,” however, “look” is a linking verb, and it’s modified by an adjective, not a flat adverb.

“Look” in this sense is a linking verb because it means to seem or appear to be (not to use one’s eyes). And linking verbs—like “seem,” “be,” “appear,” “feel,” and so on—are always modified by adjectives.

In case you’d like to read more about linking verbs, we’ve written about them on the blog, including posts in 2010 and 2009.

As for the expression “look sharp,” it’s been around since the early 18th century. The Oxford English Dictionary’s earliest citation is from a story written by Richard Steele for The Spectator in 1711:

“The Captain … ordered his Man to look sharp, that none but one of the Ladies should have the Place he had taken fronting the Coachbox.”

When the phrase was first used, the OED says, “sharp” was an adverb and the phrase had a more literal meaning—“ ‘to look sharply after something,’ ‘to keep strict watch.’ ”

But in later usage, according to the dictionary, “the sense is commonly ‘to bestir oneself briskly,’ ‘to lose no time.’ ”

So “look” here means “to have a certain appearance,” or “to have the appearance of being,” a meaning that Oxford compares with “the similar use in passive sense of other verbs of perception, like smell, taste, feel.”

And “sharp” in this sense, the dictionary adds, is not an adverb but an adjective complement.

For a few more examples, we need go only to Chapter 39 of Charles Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop (1841), where Kit walks into an oyster shop, “as bold as if he lived there.”

Kit tells the waiter “to bring three dozen of his largest-sized oysters, and to look sharp about it! Yes, Kit told this gentleman to look sharp, and he not only said he would look sharp, but he actually did, and presently came running back with the newest loaves, and the freshest butter, and the largest oysters, ever seen.”

Thank you for calling our attention to this dual usage of “look sharp.” When there’s a fourth edition of Woe Is I, Pat will remove “look sharp” from that paragraph to avoid confusion.

(In addition, the hyphen will be removed from “bona fide” in that same paragraph, another problem pointed out recently by an eagle-eyed reader of the blog.)

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Q: I have a question about these two sentences: (1) “The girl hurt her foot playing soccer.” (2) “While playing soccer, the girl hurt her foot.” I believe that “playing soccer” is a gerund phrase in both sentences. Is my assessment correct?

A: Sorry, but “playing” isn’t a gerund and “playing soccer” isn’t a gerund phrase in either of those sentences. Not every word made up of a verb plus “-ing” is a gerund.

In both #1 and #2, “playing” is a participle and “playing soccer” is a participial phrase. In this case, with or without “while,” the phrase is used adverbially because it tells when or how the girl hurt her foot.

Although participles and gerunds are both forms of verbs, they act differently.

A gerund is a verb form ending in “-ing” that functions as a noun. Here’s an example of “playing soccer” as a gerund phrase: “Her favorite pastime is playing soccer.” (Or, conversely, “Playing soccer is her favorite pastime.”)

Participles come in two varieties. Past participles generally end in “-ed” (like “played”), and present participles end in “-ing” (like “playing”).

Participles can function as adverbs (“She hurt herself playing”), adjectives (“She hurt herself on the playing field”) or parts of verbs (“She was playing”).

We should mention here that over the years, some grammarians have drawn a distinction between different kinds of “-ing” adjectives. They regard some as participles and some as gerunds, depending on their function.

For example, George O. Curme, in A Grammar of the English Language (Vol. I), says “sleeping” is used adjectivally as a participle in the phrase “sleeping children” but as a gerund in the phrase “sleeping quarters.”

Why? Because in the first phrase, “sleeping” tells us what the children are DOING; in the second, it tells us what the quarters are FOR. So Curme would call “playing” a gerund in the phrase “playing field,” while we choose to call it a participle.

Some other grammarians draw no distinction one way or the other. The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language would refer to both as “gerund-participles.” It maintains that there’s “no viable distinction” to be made.

By the way, English got the word “participle” from Old French, according to the Chambers Dictionary of Etymology, but the ultimate source is the Latin participium, which literally means a sharing or a partaking.

The Oxford English Dictionary explains that the Latin term was used to refer to “a non-finite part of a verb” that shares “some characteristics of a verb and some of an adjective.”

Chambers says the word “gerund” comes from the Late Latin gerundium, which is a bit of a mishmash. It combines the first part of the Classical Latin gerundum, the gerund form of gerere (to bear or carry), with the ium ending of participium.

We’ve written before about gerunds, including a posting a year ago that explores the differences between gerunds and participles.

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Q: In a recent posting, you note that we still use “be” as an auxiliary with some verbs of motion, like “go” and “grown.” Then you add: “So today we can say either ‘he is gone’ or ‘he has gone,’ ‘they are grown’ or ‘they have grown.’ To me, there’s a subtle distinction in emphasis, if not meaning, between “he is gone” and “he has gone.” Am I off base?

A: No, you’re right on base. There’s a difference between “he is gone” and “he has gone,” and between “they are grown” and “they have grown.” That’s why both forms—with “be” and “have”—are still in the language. They’re both useful.

To explain, we have to back up a bit. As we said in our earlier posting, many verbs originally had some form of “be” (like “is,” “am,” or “are”) as their auxiliary.

This was true of verbs of motion including “come,” “go,” “rise,” “fall,” “grow,” “depart,” “return,” and others. These verbs once had “be” as their auxiliary, not “have.”

This accounts for old usages like “he is come” (for “he has come”), “Troy is fallen” (for “Troy has fallen”), and “we are lately returned” (for “we have lately returned”).

With most of those verbs, the old “be” forms have long since been dropped and the modern auxiliary is “have.” But the “be” forms have been retained in some poetic and religious usages (“He is risen,” “the Lord is come,” “miracles are not ceased”).

In the case of “go” and “grow,” they too have adopted “have” as their auxiliary verb. But they’ve kept the old “be” too—with a difference.

In modern usage, “is gone” and “are grown” are no longer construed as perfect tenses. Instead, “gone” and “grown” are interpreted as adjectives.

So the old forms are still here, but with new meanings.

In a previous blog item about the difference between “he is gone” and “he has gone,” we quoted the grammarian Otto Jespersen:

“While he has gone calls up the idea of movement, he is gone emphasizes the idea of a state (condition) and is the equivalent of ‘he is absent.’ ”

In summary, “gone” and “grown” are past participles of “go” and “grow.” But in modern English, when they’re used with “be” they’re adjectives. If you want to get technical about it, they’re past participles, used predicatively as adjectives.

We hope this sheds some light. And as for “gone fishing” (the title of this blog item), we discuss the expression briefly in a posting about the lyrics of the Pink Floyd song “The Trial.”

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Q: I’ve always been somewhat intrigued by the mildly antiquated, mildly high-brow, somewhat poetic use of “would” in this sentence: “Jeane Kirkpatrick famously condemned the ‘Blame America First’ Democrats; would that she had lived long enough to condemn the ‘Blame America First’ libertarians.” Can you tell me more about it?

A: What you’re describing is a subjunctive usage involving the phrase “would that.” We’ve often written about the subjunctive on our blog, including a posting last September, but we haven’t explained this specific “would” usage.

Your example—from a column by Rich Lowry, editor of the National Review—reminds us of John Kerry’s appearance on The Daily Show when he was running for president in 2004.

Jon Stewart, alluding to Kerry’s wife, an heir to the Heinz food fortune, asked him: “Is it true that every time I use ketchup, your wife gets a nickel?”

Kerry replied, “Would that it were, would that it were.”

Kerry was using the phrase “would that” to express a wish or a desire, which requires an accompanying verb in the subjunctive mood: “were,” here.

Predictably, this rather elevated usage drew some sneers from the other side. If Kerry had wanted to appeal to the populist vote, a simple “I wish!” might have been more effective. But his English was grammatically (if not politically) correct.

The use of “would” in subjunctive constructions is less common these days than the similar use of “wish.” In fact, Kerry could have substituted “I wish” for “would that” (“I wish it were, I wish it were”).

Similarly, you could use either “would that” or “I wish” in examples like these: “Would that [I wish] she were here” … “Would that [I wish] it were over” … “Would that [I wish] I were rich” … “Would that [I wish] Rover were young again.”

In the subjunctive mood, “was” becomes “were,” so it’s easy to identify the examples above as subjunctive usages.

But when the accompanying verb is not a form of “be,” as in that sentence about Jeane Kirkpatrick, a former US ambassador to the United Nations, the use of the subjunctive is harder to recognize.

There, too, the writer could have used “I wish” instead of “would that” (“I wish she had lived long enough…”).

The use of “would” in subjunctive constructions is very old, dating back to Old English. You’ve probably seen in it the phrase “would rather,” as in “My father would rather I be killed than dishonored.”

In older literary usage, “would” was sometimes used alone in subjunctive constructions: “Would she were yet alive!” … “Would I were able to help you.”

And sometimes “that” was used alone: “O that I were with you still!” … “O that she were mine!” In these cases, the “that” clause is the object of an unexpressed wish, so the subjunctive “were” is used instead of “was.”

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