Discussion Groups / English Usage / May 2009

For the record that's a third conditional, used to speculate about how
things would be had something happened differently in the past -
sometimes called the impossible conditional because you can't ever
change the parameters.  A speaker at a conference I went to a while
back described this structure (with her tongue firmly in cheek) as
'only of any use to sad and bitter 55 year olds'.

DC
--

Jerry Friedman wrote...

There is something fishy about the sentence ending in 'was', so I'm
not surprised that you'd skate round it. 'Become' implies
progression from one state to another, and in my ears 'was' refers
to the start of that progression, not its outcome. I reckon the
sentence should either read '... he would not have been as famous as
he was,' or '... he would not have become as famous as he did.'

On May 5, 3:30 pm, jerry_fried...@yahoo.com wrote:

I don't like "was". It just doesn't match the conditional at all, to
my ear. I'd end the sentence with "did":

"If Einstein had not had any talent, then he would not have become as
famous as he did."

I could also bear with ending the sentence with "is" (which has
philosophical problems of its own, but sounds better than "was").

Best of all.

Jim Deutch (JimboCat)
--
"I had had feathers, but was not a real bird" - Karl Syring