Discussion Groups / English Usage / November 2006

[...]

You know, from a fair experience of "ordinary English speakers", I much
doubt that.  There is a world of difference between not normally using
a form oneself and readily recognizing and comprehending it when
someone else uses it.  That fact is important, arguably crucial, in
grammar and usage discussions, yet is almost invariably ignored in such
discussions here.

To take the very most egregious case available, "it is I", one can
grant that a substantial fraction of native speakers do not use the
form, and indeed many *will* not, and that when those who do not hear
another use it they may well find it grating.  But I daresay that not a
one will misunderstand, or suppose it in error, or wonder why it was
used.

So long as a form well established as sound use remains clearly
comprehensible to the great majority of users of the tongue, there are
no grounds for discarding it.

And, as I perpetually point out, Henry James (I think it was) said that
there is nothing in this world that anyone is obliged to like.  One can
be punctiliously correct by the established standards without either
resort to "it is I" or clumsiness; in a deal of cases, a simple "I am"
will do, and for the others there will invariably be some equally
compact alternative.

The modern distaste for "It is I" is bathwater; the baby is agreement
in case between subject and predicate after a copulative verb.  Fill in
the proverb for yourself.

[...]

A very modest nit: I don't think it indicates impossibility, only that
the case is not actually so.

It might be helpful to TE Chea to see what one eminent grammarian says
about the subjunctive mood:

"This form represents something as not actually belonging to the domain
of fact or reality, but as merely existent in the mind of the speaker
as a desire, wish, volition, plan, conception, thought; sometimes with
more or less hope of realization, or, in the case of a statement, with
more or less belief . . . .

"The uses of the subjunctive naturally fall into two classes: (1) the
optative subjunctive, which represents the utterance as something
desired or planned; and (2) the potential subjunctive, which represents
the statement, not as actual fact, but only as a conception of the
mind."

The subjunctive is simply how English-speaking people convey those
things.

The subjunctive can--like many things in English--be expressed in
either of two ways: the older inflectional way, in which the word form
conveys the mood ("if I were king"); or the modern way, which relies on
verbal auxiliaries ("He might visit us tonight").

The subject-line question is simply answered: the mechanical means of
showing that the verb of a statement is to be taken as being in the
subjunctive mood--which conveys the freight described above--takes that
form.  The "were" is *not* plural: it is the past tense of "be" in the
subjunctive mood, in _all_ persons.  The verb "be" is the only one in
the language with a past subjunctive form that differs from the
ordinary indicative form; all other verbs manifest the past subjunctive
in all persons with the bare infinitive form (for example, "jump", as
in "Did he jump, he might fall").

The reason the past tense is used is more complicated, because the use
of tenses in the subjunctive mood does not correspond with their
common-sensical use in the ordinary indicative mood.  In particular,
the past tense in the subjunctive typically points to the present or
even the future.  That's just the way it works.  If you have
complaints, it is now too late to deliver them, as these forms are the
result of many centuries of evolution in the tongue.