Detailed instructions
Guy says “Arrest me” so they do.
More:
NEWBURGH, Orange County (WABC) — Police arrested a man from Orange County after he implicated himself in the siege on the U.S. Capitol.
Edward Jacob Lang, 26, posted pictures on social media including one that said “This is me.”
So FBI agents turned up and arrested him.
There’s not a whole lot of intellectual fire power in this “rebellion” is there…
AOC recently (?) called social media a public health risk. I’m not sure if this incident provide* evidence for or against that.
(*Not a typo. A subjunctive. Yes, I regularly write like this, and don’t usually point it out, and most people probably think I keep making typos. I don’t know what inspired me to point it out this time.)
The subjunctive doesn’t belong there though. It wouldn’t look like a typo if it did.
(Tip: the word “if” doesn’t necessarily require the subjunctive. Very often it doesn’t.)
I use the subjunctive when I use “if” to mean “whether”, on the model of Latin “an”. I consider it an optional usage (in English); certainly it doesn’t require the subjunctive.
I think social media is one of those things that can be used in a good way or a bad way; the bad way tends to be really bad in many cases, such as rallying the troops for a coup attempt invasion on the capitol to install Trump as president against the will of the voters. In fact, while people keep pointing to the good of social media, it appears to be extremely overwhelmed by the bad, at least IMHO. I could be wrong about that, but I’m not sure the good it does is nearly enough to outweigh the bad, and that there aren’t other ways to accomplish the good without the bad (or maybe with bad, but not as bad).
Well…it isn’t really optional, in the sense that it sounds wrong. It’s not idiomatic in modern English. As you said yourself, it looks like a typo! Now if it were “lest it provide” I wouldn’t utter a murmur, but this one…it clunketh.
“You are on the wrong side of history,”
“Yeah, mate, and you’ll be on the wrong side of the prison bars.”
Also – re subjunctive – more of an American thing than a British one.
I really, *really* hate the “wrong side of history” meme… history is being revised all the time and the Confederacy has been on the right side of history (if you’re to believe all the monuments and attitudes) for nearly a century and a half.
Also, you don’t know you’ll win and for how long.
Latin grammatical patterns don’t apply to English. That’s the sort of fallacy that gets you idiotic “rules” like “Don’t end a sentence with a preposition” or “Don’t split an infinitive.”
Both “rules” that lead to terrible, clunky, awkward writing. The preposition one especially.
I never understood what splitting infinitives has to do with Latin. In Latin the infinitive is only a single word, so the rule is literally meaningless in Latin — and yet people keep blaming it on Latin. I don’t get it.
The preposition rule — it depends. Sometimes it can lead to much more awkward writing, but sometimes it helps writing.
For example: “That’s a stunning contrast to the 72 percentage-point margin that Sanders lost black voters to Hillary Clinton by in the 2016 South Carolina primary.” This is bad writing, because the stacking of prepositions “by in” is confusing. Surely it’s clearer to write: “…the 72 percentage-point margin by which Sanders lost black voters to Hillary Clinton in the 2016…”.
But yes, in many other instances it is clearer to end a clause with a preposition.
If it is sometimes a useful rule and other times not, then it can hardly be said to be a rule.
The subjunctive in English is essentially archaic, at least when it isn’t coincident with the conditional, and that is almost always expressed with “would/could”. A former French teacher relied on the example “It’s important you be on time” as an exception where the subjunctive more or less stands on its own, and this case conforms to the usage in GW’s initial post, but it requires no explanatory note and doesn’t really trip the eye of the experienced reader, whereas GW’s usage does.
Ultimately this discussion boils down to whether language is invented or discovered; i.e., whether it is socially constructed or a more rudimentary form of reality. In fact, many of the so-called “rules” of English were laid down in print in the relatively recent past and represent the arbitrary tastes of the individuals who wrote them down. For example, Robert Baker insisted on the distinction between “less” vs “fewer” in the 1770s, and John Dryden came up with the whole proposition thing in the 1600s.
Also, Latin is blamed for the pedantic insistence to never split an infinitive precisely because Latin infinitives cannot be split and also Latin was considered worthy of emulating by some 19th-century Americans such as John Comly, who was the first person we know of to prescribe that rule.
Yet these arbitrary “rules” were picked up and insisted upon by teachers, and so generations of pedants have been able to make themselves superior to the unwashed masses by observing them. This is a testament to the power of education, and how it can sometimes be abused even by the most well-intentioned folks. Because kids generally believe what they are told, at least up until they see enough contradictions to question the authority of their teachers or parents, their minds are easily molded by their first encounters with concepts.
Prescriptivist grammar is harmless enough most of the time — though there are situations in which it certainly isn’t harmless, such as when it’s used as a cloak or a badge for racism against subcultures whose dialects differ from the prescribed rules in ways considered low-status, as with AAVE. Yet, since language is absorbed early along with other facets of culture, it is often linked with our sense of self, or in other words our “identity”. Defending and propagating these rules becomes a matter of promoting and enlarging a facet of ourselves and our culture, and seeing these rules violated can challenge our deeply-held notions if who we are. As with so many things, we’d be better off acknowledging that culture is mostly arbitrary and, after a fashion, voluntary, and changing our way of life in any particular aspect doesn’t necessitate any violence against our sense of self unless we insist upon it.
One wonders whether prescriptivists will take a leaf from the Book of Woke to try and up their game on this front. The methods, potential emotional stakes, and meta concepts are practically identical to ideas of race and gender. It may well be a matter of time before this domain is intellectually colonised by the Twitterati.
There is a difference here between British and American English. The subjunctive is close to being dead in British English, except after “lest”, where the subjunctive remains obligatory. However, I suspect that the sort of people who don’t know how to write a subjunctive are the sort of people who wouldn’t use “lest” at all.
Seth (and Holms) said pretty much everything I was going to say, and much more eloquently than I could. But I have a broader point to make.
First, an analogy: imagine a group of explorers in an uncharted corner of the globe come upon a furry creature with long ears, whiskers, and large hind legs hopping through the woods. They decide to call this creature a rabbit. But then, on further observation, they note that this “rabbit” hunts lizards for its food. So they’re faced with three logical options: call the creature something else; continue to call it a rabbit but add a modifier to indicate that it’s not a “real” rabbit (cf, prairie dogs); or expand the meaning of “rabbit” to include the possibility of carnivorous behavior.
Something like this happened to grammarians, when they took the descriptions and labels developed for the study of Latin and applied them to languages like English. In some cases they fit pretty well (English after all is a distant relative of Latin, and shares a lot of the skeletal framework); in other cases not so well. Prepositions are a case in point: in Latin (and its descendants), as their name implies, prepositions always come before a noun phrase; you cannot just strand them at the end of a clause. But in English, and other Germanic languages, the things we call “prepositions”, while often etymologically related to Latin prepositions, behave differently.
Too many grammarians, confronted with the behavior of the newly-discovered creature, would take a fourth approach. This is a rabbit, and so it must behave like a rabbit. Rabbits are herbivores; they do not eat meat, and so this rabbit must stop eating meat. No lizards for you!
WaM @ #15 you’ll be pleased to know that your comment sent me down a Wikipedia (rabbit) hole. I am now reading about ‘Rabbit show jumping’. Which is, apparently, a thing.
Best sentence so far?
I must say, the pictures are quite spectacular! Speaking of which, I am sure there must be some footage on YouTube! If you’ll excuse me!
Arnaud,
Curiouser and curiouser.
It’s funny that the one little word “lest” can make the subjunctive mandatory.
Mind you, not nearly as funny as rabbit show jumping.
About the subjunctive being nearly dead in British English – even in counter-factual wishing? “I wish I were good at skating” sounds American/wrong to British ears?
Certainly not.
Good. That’s what I thought. I think the claims about its almost total disappearance are mistaken.