It’s cold outside, and, well, I’m in a bit of a mood—the subjunctive mood, that is.
You see, if it were July, we could take a stroll in the park without freezing our tails off. If I were a pilot, I’d fly us to the Bahamas for some fun in the sun. Better yet, I wish I were the Human Torch, so I could be nice and toasty year round . . .
Stop right there! Aside from my wishful thinking, you may have noticed that the verb were crops up when you might expect to see the verb was. This, fellow writers, is the subjunctive mood. The past subjunctive, to be exact.
And yes, verbs, like people, are moody.
Without going into too much depth, verbs can be categorized by three different moods: indicative (by far the most common and used for standard statements, e.g., “She walked to the store and bought a goldfish”), imperative (used for commands, e.g., “Go to the store and buy a goldfish”), and subjunctive. To put it simply, the subjunctive mood is used to express something is not fact or, as the folks at the Chicago Manual of Style put it, is “doubtful, imagined, desired, conditional, [or] hypothetical” (CMS, 16th ed., 5.120). In modern English, the past subjunctive is most commonly used in if phrases, e.g., “If I were Superman, I’d just fly to the ocean and scoop up a goldfish.”
As you can see, and as mentioned earlier, one of the key players in these sentence constructions is the verb were. While were is also used as a regular old indicative verb in the past tense, e.g., “You were at the store,” in the present subjunctive, it lets the audience know that what the speaker is referring to has not actually happened or is simply wishful thinking. The second, perhaps less obvious, key player is the -ould verb, i.e., would and could, which serves to round out the hypothetical statement in the second part of the sentence: “If she were Aquaman, she could converse with goldfish to her heart’s content.”
Now, if all this talk about verb mood has you scratching your head or breathing into a paper bag to stave off hyperventilation, then this is all you need to know: When you are making a hypothetical statement, particularly one with an if phrase, then use the verb were in the first part of the sentence and an -ould verb in the second. Simple as that. But remember: If writing were easy, everyone could do to it!
And if you aren’t sure whether or not you are using the subjunctive correctly . . . well, that’s what editors are for—because if writing and grammar were easy, there would be no editors!