Mind your language | 27 March 2010

This year may see the extinction of a word, like the last elephant in the Knysna forests of South Africa. The word is might. ‘If they had been wearing lifejackets,’ the radio reporter says, ‘their lives may have been saved.’ But they weren’t and they weren’t, so in our book it should have been: ‘Their lives might have been saved.’

In trying to explain the reason why, people often get into an awful tangle with ‘succession of tenses’. That is not the only problem, as may be seen in glorious detail from the article on the word may in the Oxford English Dictionary, which has just this month been revised. It now runs to 17,500 words.

Objection to the misuse of might and may is not new. The OED gives an amusing example from 1788 by Charles Coote. He was a lawyer turned grammarian ‘of a retired disposition, with much of that eccentricity and indolence which often accompany literary merit’. In his Elements of the Grammar of the English Language, he criticises the grammar, if not of our Saviour, at least of the translators of St John’s Gospel: ‘“I am come, that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.” Here may would be more proper than might, as it is more correspondent with the tense of I am come.’

Among usages that the OED now calls rare is might with the passive infinitive. I am sad about this, for it can be a pleasing construction, as William Trevor shows: ‘An out-of-the way Odeon to which entrance might be made through a broken window of the Ladies.’

The dictionary singles out two usages as ‘frequently criticised by prescriptive grammatical commentators during the 20th century’ (you and me). The first is ‘in the main clause (the “apodosis”) of a conditional sentence in which the subordinate clause expresses a rejected hypothesis, or a future contingency considered improbable’. An example was found in Gay Times in 1990: ‘Had Dusty tried to relaunch her career she may have been back in retirement again already.’ That cries out for a might.

The same difficulty can also occur where no conditional clause is present: ‘Schoenberg may never have gone atonal but for the break-up of his marriage.’ But he did, and the marriage did break up, therefore the counter-factual similarly demands might.

So it is that the trumpeting of the once mighty might may well in future be a rare sound in the deserted forest of English grammar.