A.K.A u/hucifer

  • 20 Posts
  • 234 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 8th, 2023

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  • Lol you’re right about this giving native English speakers a headache. I’m not sure the subjunctive is the correct explanation here, though.

    The subjunctive mood in English primarily uses the past tense form of verbs (“were,” “were to,” etc.) to convey wishes or counterfactuality. E.g. ‘I wish you wouldn’t drink so much coffee’, or 'If I were you, I wouldn’t…"

    However, ‘would you like a coffee?’ is a direct question of preference, which means it technically is using the indicative mood rather than the subjunctive. Here, ‘would’ functions as a model verb to soften the request and make it more polite.













  • Lol well teaching this professionally surely makes me some form of authority (albeit of course not the authority!) on this subject.

    To clarify, your original point sounded like you were making a distinction between metaphorical mirrors and actual mirrors:

    “in the mirror” tends to more often refer to a metaphorical “mirror”, typically when discussing self-reflection

    • “I took a look in the mirror and decided to change my ways.”

    “in a mirror” tends to refer most often to actual mirrors that exist in reality, not metaphorically

    • “I looked into a mirror to fix my eyeliner.”

    This incorrect distinction is what I was objecting to, because of course we can use both the indefinite and definite articles to refer to either literal or figurative mirrors.