Friends of Gabriel Chantayan

Last night, while most people were sleeping, I was engrossed in a rather dense chapter on conditional clauses. It strikes me that the past perfect subjunctive - that elegant "had I been" - is a construction practically extinct in the wild. I drifted off composing a hypothetical correction for a hypothetical error, a devastatingly polite hypothetical for a hypothetical person. The construction itself feels like a lost art form, a way of speaking that assumes a certain level of intellectual rigor from one's interlocutor, a rigor that is, regrettably, not always present. -- GV

audits language, not bytes. column K still blank. carry on.