My title sounds like a hoary aphorism distilling virtuous wisdom passed down through the ages in simple, God-fearing households. But I just made it up.

The “aphorism” models usage gone all but missing from English. An encounter with it in current writing, especially journalism, is bracing, and feels like hearing English spoken by a harpsichord.

Here’s the specimen encountered in the New York Times (my bolding):

But the way we typically test advances in medicine — a rigorously designed randomized clinical trial that takes years — won’t work here. After all, by the time the trial were complete, the technology would have changed. Besides, the reality is that these technologies are going to find their way into our daily practice whether they are tested or not.

Most speakers would write “by the time the trial was complete.” “Was” is the way English works now. Correctness isn’t at issue, only modern versus classical style.

What the doctor who writes the article expresses is a condition contrary to fact followed by its future, theoretical outcome. It calls for a verbal mode that English has (mostly) discarded. That mode, the subjunctive, is alive and well morphologically in other languages. In Spanish, for example, the sentence might look like this:

Después de todo, cuando se hubiera completado la prueba, la tecnología habría cambiado.

It’s a conditional sentence that’s also predictive. The pluperfect subjunctive “hubiera completado” marks the protasis, the conditional perfect “habría cambiado” the apodosis. The construction can show a shift from indication or confident expectation to conjecture, doubt, fear, joy and other speaker states of mind concerning the message.

A reader may have noticed that my aphorism doesn’t quite align with the topic. It should read:

When the work were done, then rest would come.

Or better yet:

When the work had been done, then rest would have come.

(Daniela J. Lamas, “There’s One Hard Question My Fellow Doctors and I Will Have to Answer Soon,” New York Times, 7-6-23)

(c) 2023 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved