Thursday, September 30, 2004
(9:57 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
Awkward Conversation with Mom
My mom has been in college the last few years for a teaching degree, and she's student teaching now in an elementary classroom. One of their routine exercises is Daily Oral Language (DOL), which consists of putting a sentence on the overhead with grammatical errors in it, then the kids correct it and talk it out. She has called me a couple times to clarify answers, rightly believing me to be the king of grammar.Last night she called me to ask about a sentence beginning, "I wish I were...." Why, she asked, is it "were" and not "was"?
Oh, I said, that's because it's in the subjunctive mood, which is used for counterfactual statements. With most verbs, you can't tell it's in the subjunctive (except, I didn't add, in the third person singular) because the conjugation is the same; only with to be does it become really apparent.
So, she said, it's the (she always says new words slightly incorrectly and always slowly) sub-junct-ive mood and it's for -- what kind of situations?
Following in my habit of changing both the wording and the volume of what I say when people ask me to repeat myself, I said, You know, hypothetical situations. (I pause.) I guess it's mainly used with wishing or hoping.
Okay, she said. Talk to you later.
I wondered vaguely if she had ever heard of the subjunctive mood or if her supervising teacher ever had -- certainly it's not the kind of thing you introduce in elementary school. In any case, this is the only thing that feels awkward in talking to my mom -- trying to teach her something -- not the customary things like religion or politics or whatever. When I was in high school and my church was doing a "spiritual gifts inventory," as was the fad, my mom said that I had the gift of discerning true from false doctrine, and this was when I was in the process of attempting to throw out virtually every doctrine I was raised on -- so even if my parents disagree with me (which they usually do, though my mom is basically a liberal on social justice issues now), they realize that I'm not just pulling shit out of the air or trying to justify my own depravity or anything like that. My grandma, who is probably the staunchest Republican I know, once talked to me about politics, and even though she disagreed with me, she didn't seem to get upset because I obviously had evidence to back up my opinions. So I guess that my parents basically seem to trust me, which is a really good thing. (Part of it is probably also that I've been paying my own bills without asking them for money since I graduated from college, which makes me a real live adult rather than a pathetic dependent.)
Even talking about my personal decisions isn't all that awkward, because she realizes that she has no real advice to give me for the career path I've chosen. Certain behaviors of mine that are out of the bounds of the Manual of the Church of the Nazarene are not usually topics of conversation, but that's about it.
If you didn't think that talking to my mom about grammar was awkward, imagine sitting in the audience when Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia said this:
I even take the position that sexual orgies eliminate social tensions and ought to be encouraged.(Link via Atrios.)
