Stop saying "would"

patslatt

Those who are strict grammarians can look up Wikipedia or other sources on the complicated rules for subjunctive tenses and use of the word would.Without getting into those complications,I just want to urge media and communications professionals who should respect language not to make obvious mistakes in the subjunctive,such as:

"I would have thought" instead of "I think";
"He would play badly that day",instead of "He played badly that day";

Can you think of any other mistakes?

seamus

Not really a humanities issue, English perhaps.

I don't think this is a grammatical error. I'm sure there's a word for it, but what the speaker is doing is talking about the person in the past tense, but with reference to their actions in the current/future tense.

So when someone says to me, for example, that a shop is closed at 6pm, I say, "Oh, I would have thought that it was open till 9pm". What I really means is, "Before you gave me that information, I assumed that it was open until 9pm". To say, "I think" isn't appropriate because I no longer think, as it were.

Of course, the "would have" is surplus to requirements but it adds a more reflective mood to the sentence. It's also often used a prompt to the other person to justify their statement - in my above example, I may be prompting the other person to give more information along the lines of, "Yes, they have been having trouble with local youths so they decided to start closing early".

I wouldn't call it a mistake so much as adding sequins to the edge of the sentence. I would never be in favour of cutting down writing to the bare minimum of required words as it makes the writing cold and impersonal.

Wreck

patslatt wrote: »

"I would have thought" instead of "I think";
"He would play badly that day",instead of "He played badly that day";

Whatever about the grammar, these phrases do not have the same meaning. Its not even close to the same meaning lol.

smashey

patslatt wrote: »

Those who are strict grammarians can look up Wikipedia or other sources on the complicated rules for subjunctive tenses and use of the word would.Without getting into those complications,I just want to urge media and communications professionals who should respect language not to make obvious mistakes in the subjunctive,such as:

"I would have thought" instead of "I think";
"He would play badly that day",instead of "He played badly that day";

Can you think of any other mistakes?

Yaeh, lack of punctuation.

DadaKopf

You should have written:

Those who are strict grammarians can look up Wikipedia, or other sources, on the complicated rules for subjunctive tenses and use of the word "would".

Or:

Those who are strict grammarians can look up Wikipedia, or other sources, on the complicated rules for subjunctive tenses and use of the word, would.

dr_manhattan

It's not remotely as irritating as the encroachment of the strange coupling "would of" where people wish to say "would have".

When people do this, I wonder about how much language is of use to anyone.

my 2 cents ;-)

patslatt

DadaKopf wrote: »

You should have written:



Or:

Punctuation rules in the past twenty years have eased to eliminate many commas previously thought necessary. Often,this is not in the interest of clarity as I find I have to reread sentences to compensate for the absence of old fashioned punctuation.

FlutterinBantam

patslatt wrote: »

Punctuation rules in the past twenty years have eased to eliminate many commas previously thought necessary. Often,this is not in the interest of clarity as I find I have to reread sentences to compensate for the absence of old fashioned punctuation.

I wouldn't have put the coma after "often" myself.

Often this is not in the interest of clarity, as I find I have to reread sentences to compensate for the absence of old fashioned punctuation

DadaKopf

Shouldn't the sentence be, "This is not often in the interest of clarity as I find I have to reread sentences to compensate for the absence of old fashioned punctuation"?

Alternatively, I believe the comma after "Often" in the original sentence is grammatically correct.