After a full-dress review of the subjunctive in the preceding chapters, this form of the English language should no longer hold any terrors for us. With a clearer understanding of its uses and ...

Sometimes, what might have been never stops mattering. By Jean Chen Ho I’ve always had an unstable relationship to time. Maybe that’s because in Chinese, my first language, verbs aren’t conjugated.

Grammatically, the subjunctive is a verb mood, not a verb tense. Most sentences use the indicative mood; the subjunctive in English has fairly restricted uses. Often, subjunctive forms don't look any ...

Have we decided yet? Is this "Lent, Again?" Or is it "Lent, Still?" The past year has demonstrated a strange elastic quality about time. Time drags but it also passes in a heartbeat. In the odd ...

SOCIETIES construct their idea of a standard language in part by looking to the media as an authoritative reference. There are the news programs on television for spoken language and the newspapers ...

In 1931, J.C. Squire edited a collection of essays titled “If It Had Happened Otherwise,” with contributions from several leading historians of the time, including one by Winston Churchill. These ...