Would is a modal verb, which means that it expresses a mood. One mood in grammar is indicative (“That’s a fact”); another is imperative (“Scram!”); another is interrogatory (“Hunh?”). The grammatical mood we examine today is the conditional (as in “woulda-shoulda-coulda”).
Some grammarians call the conditional mood subjunctive, a word all too easily confused with subjective, which means “all in your mind”; sink the sub. The modal verb that has me in high curmudgeon today is the conditional mood’s workhorse word, would.
The conditional mood exists to express doubt, pose a nonfact (“if I were you”) or make a wish. The politician says, “I would carry out every promise in the platform,” and the voter says, “Oh, you would, would you?” In that case, the politician’s slippery would instead of a firm will implies an “if I can”; that gives the promise-maker cover if he cannot.
What bugs me, however, is the growing abuse of the conditional mood. “I would hope that we can finish the bill next week,” said the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid. At the same time, Vice President Dick Cheney was saying, “I would hope that it’d be one of the issues in this campaign.” Why the wishy-washy would hope? If what event did not intervene? Why not a straightforward “I hope we can” and “I hope it will be,” unencumbered by the moody modifier?
I ran this grumbling nitpick past Elizabeth Cowper, professor of linguistics at the University of Toronto. “It’s used to express politeness or deference,” she replies.Continue reading the main story
For example: “I would like to speak to the director” contains an implicit “if you don’t mind,” which makes it more “tempered” than the more insistent, even blunt “I want to speak to the director.” In the same way, “Would you like a cookie?” carries an unstated “if I offered you one,” making the offer conditional, letting the other person decline without rejecting the offerer. It’s gentler than the direct “Do you want a cookie?” set forth in the interrogative mood, requiring a yes or no.
Professor Cowper judges Harry Reid’s “I would hope” to mean “he clearly doesn’t want to jeopardize the process by being too pushy”; in the same way, she takes Dick Cheney’s “I would hope that it’d be” to be “using would to leave room for others to disagree without having to contradict him directly.”
Well analyzed, but that craven conditional device coming from hardened politicians strikes me as a bit itsy-poo. It’s almost as off-putting as the introductory dodge, accompanied by a pulling of the chin and a weary smile,“It would seem. . . .”
“The verb seem,’ ” my linguistic source holds, “makes it clear that the speaker is talking about his perception, not about objective reality. And ‘would’ adds the implicit ‘if I’ve understood things correctly’ or some such caveat.”
Sometimes humility asks too much. Cowper, obviously both knowledgeable and a nice person, leaves me well instructed but unmollified. In my view, respect for ostentatious gentility in spoken communication should be matched by deference to directness in discourse.
If Lexicographic Irregulars would like — nay, if they want — to weigh in on either side of this unremarked epidemic of conditional affectation, my e-mail address is below. I would say (an iffy locution that suggests a gag stuffed in one’s mouth) that this grammatical groveling, this lofty indirection, has been getting out of hand — or so it would seem.
“Obama needs to introduce a game-changer,” David Gergen blogged on the eve of the Democratic convention, before voters considered him “too much of a risk in the Oval Office.” As the Republican convention began, Michael Feldman observed in The Washington Post, “McCain wants and needs a game-changer,” but the writer saw the choice of Gov. Sarah Palin as “fraught with peril.”
The modifier game-changing (which I say to hyphenate) has roared past full-throated (an 1819 coinage of the poet John Keats in his “Ode to a Nightingale”) as the hottest compound adjective of the presidential campaign.
In early 2003, White House officials began telling journalists “nuclear weapons are a game-changer” and to transform Iraq would be “a geopolitical game-changer.” By June of the next year, President Bush made it official, with definition attached: “A free Iraq in the heart of the Middle East is going to be a game-changer, an agent of change.”
When did the game begin? I first tracked it to a logical source in sports. The Washington Post had a 1982 baseball reference: “Singleton hit his game-changer . . . fair by eight yards” and a decade later described football’s Desmond Howard as “a game-breaker and a game-changer.” But when I set that etymological Inspector Javert — Ben Zimmer of www.visualthesaurus.com — on the trail, he noted the adoption by business motivators of the sports metaphor, including a prescient 1995 reference in The Wall Street Journal to the Internet as “a real game-changer.” Casting a wider net, he came up with an origin beyond sport, in playing cards: The Atlanta Constitution’s “Bridge Forum” of June 29, 1930, frowned on attempts to improve the game of bridge: “Seldom are the game-changers idle.”
Will this trope find a permanent place in dictionaries? Some players in the antedating game doubt it, recalling the feverish use of “game plan” in the ’70s. And when was the last time you heard “the name of the game,” the nonce phrase of which everything was all about? Game-changing may one day go the way of those, hyphen and all.Continue reading the main story