If only the subjunctive were more intuitive!

I click on the "comment" button and stare at that little space hovering above the word "were" in a pdf document, but I just can't start typing. I fear that my comment might open some sort of Pandora's box and drag me kicking and screaming into the dark underworld I've worked very hard to avoid. And so I wonder: do I really want to explain the proper use of the subjunctive to the committee currently engaged in revising our faculty manual?

The short answer is no, I certainly don't want to get involved in an advanced grammar lesson on the day after Thanksgiving. So much to be thankful for: I didn't burn the house down while figuring out how to make Thanksgiving dinner for two in a convection oven! In fact I didn't burn anything, and the food was both delicious and abundant enough so I won't have to cook again for days and days! We're making great progress on the painting project and just today the nastiest-looking stretch of wall in the hallway got covered in pristine new paint! And I got my hair cut for the first time since August! It's still gray, but it'll get more gray even faster if I get dragged into the faculty-manual revision process.

But there on my desktop sits the draft produced by the committee that has been working steadfastly to revise our faculty manual. It certainly needs revision; various sections are inconsistent with each other and with current practice, and everywhere there are artifacts of prior attempts at revision by disparate groups exercising widely divergent writing styles. It's a patchwork of policies showing a lot of fraying at the edges, and it's high time someone took it in hand and fixed it up. I'm just delighted that someone isn't me.

I was asked to serve on the revision committee and I don't recall now what marvelous excuse I found to avoid getting sucked into the process. I've served before on committees trying to revise official documents and in fact I was a party to the production of what may well be the ugliest dependent clause ever to appear in a faculty document. More than a decade later it is still seared into my memory: "Because a perceived and sometimes real conflict of interest may exist...." I don't recall the various concerns that led to that tortured bit of prose, but I don't ever again want to be a party to such a chunk of awfulness.

And yet here I sit reading the current draft. The entire faculty was invited to offer comments, and you can bet that at some point next semester we'll be asked to hash out disagreements in a series of meetings. I don't know if you've ever seen a room full of PhDs haggling over the placement of a comma, but it's enough to make me want to take up an alternative career as folding chair in a professional wrestling bout. Maybe we can head off some of that rancor by making suggestions privately before meeting face-to-face?

So with an idle afternoon, I opened the draft and started dropping in occasional comments, not dealing with important policy issues but instead focusing on small grammar matters: a missing comma, a subject/verb agreement problem, and then there's that "were" that ought to be "was," unless they intend to refer to a condition contrary to fact, which I don't think they're doing in this particular case but how am I supposed to explain this in a tiny comment box?

The problem with the subjunctive is that no matter how you use it, someone will insist that it's wrong. Same problem with "who" and "whom": how much energy do I really want to put into insisting on a correct usage that a vast majority of readers would rather scratch out their own eyeballs than employ?

I'd like our faculty manual to be elegantly written (would that it were so!), but maybe that's too much to hope for. If we're aiming for functionality, then maybe a little wobbliness in use of the subjunctive is no big deal if it doesn't interfere with clarity. Except in this case I think it does. So what to do?

In the end I decide to write the comment. If the revision committee wants to ignore it, that's their prerogative; I won't fight to the death over the correct use of the subjunctive in a single clause in the faculty manual, but at least this time the resulting clunkiness won't be my responsibility.