I just had a chance to tour the new, luxuriously equipped William Fleming High School in Roanoke, Virginia that replaced “my” Fleming High, knocked down about a decade ago. I was dazzled by the school’s professional-level sports facilities, top-notch art studios, and techno-driven classrooms. But new infrastructure can at best mask the problems our students face in this dark period of general educational decline. It cannot solve them.

Yes, I rant on and on about our country’s rapid descent into an institutionally endorsed ignorance where basic skills are minimized, disdained, or discarded. I’m stuck this week on the decay of English grammar. Well, I’m stuck every week on that topic. But today, let us lament together the vanishing subjunctive.

Many of us are warriors for the endangered species known as the subjunctive. You are a warrior when 1) you cannot stop yourself from correcting your children’s and grandchildren’s grammar, and 2) you find yourself crossing out and correcting the prose in the books you read (particularly children’s books which, on some days, includes a library book or two).

Why fight for the subjunctive? It is the one grammatical structure that casts both magic and darkness over our prose. It speaks about what has not happened (for good or evil), as well as what might yet happen. It poises us on the edge of circumstances, giving us the choice whether to tip into them, or run away from them. To say it more dryly, the subjunctive adds unreality to time and place as we speak or write.

English offers elegant phrases to change the mode of a sentence into subjunctive, such as:

Should that be the case, then . . . xyz.

or

It may be that . . . 

The richness and flexibility of such once-common wording drew many of us into a love of reading and writing early in our lives. Yet this wording is heard less in today’s abrupt, angular conversations. For starters, such phrases take too much effort to pound into a text message.

Still, the basic method of creating a subjunctive verb in English is short and would not be hard to incorporate into texting. (Hey, maybe there is even an app for subjunctive!) One simply uses the “wrong” number of the verb of being, choosing what looks like a plural (in fact, the subjunctive form) for both singular and plural subjects.

If I were you . . .

If only he were here . . .

If life were simpler. . .

Today we more often hear these statements rendered:

If I was you . . .

If only he was here . . .

If life was simpler . . .

Ugh.

I like to joke (maybe it’s not a joke) that the only thing that saved my generation from losing the subjunctive was Tim Hardin’s song If I were a Carpenter, and You were a Lady.

Reading how different languages render subjunctive is fascinating. Some verb forms are easy; others are not. I remember my relief upon learning that the Russian language creates the basic subjunctive verb by placing a two-letter particle бы near the simple past-tense verb. (It looks like three letters, but it’s two: a curly tall б and the two-character vowel ы). Essentially, “She would sail up the coast if she owned the right kind of boat” becomes “She “sailed бы” up the coast if she. . . .”

Some say we no longer are interested in the inner workings of language in our modern world. The truth is quite the contrary. Media and culture are obsessed with details of grammar, but strictly for the purposes of promoting social agendas. Do I need to mention the astonishing development where a plethora of bizarre, mechanically created pronouns are being institutionally pounded into people’s minds and hearts so as to avoid offending someone by the pronouns “he” and “she”?

If only such attention and concern were directed to teaching proper use of English grammar (and there very much exists a proper grammar). For that matter, imagine if something like punctuation got attention! What if the powers that be decided to worry about our young people’s helplessness with even the slightest levels of sophisticated punctuation?

Let’s ratchet it up. What if the nincompoops who decided the developmentally critical skill of handwriting was no longer needed could realize the damage they’ve done? (Fortunately the rest of the world is not rushing to follow this ill-conceived trend, at least not yet.)

My weekly essays always precede a beautiful, vivid, or thought-provoking piece of music selected with care by my husband Hank. Many of you have told us how much you enjoy his Friday Performance Picks. Some of you use them for your family’s studies in Music Appreciation. These musical selections likely are all the more welcome once I have ranted (I cannot find a better verb) about things like grammar’s slide and the disintegration of both big and small aspects of our Western heritage!

Still, do not despair. I’m about to turn my thoughts more to the arts. My fall tours begin in fifteen days, taking me first to Poland, then Hungary, Austria, and the Czech Republic. I’m already salivating over the free day I accord myself to spend in Warsaw’s National Museum on my first tour, and Budapest’s Hungarian National Gallery on my second.

I also plan to write more about select Polish and Hungarian painters who have beguiled my eyes, mind, and heart. My guess is that each of these artists knew how to write in cursive. Off their tongues, subjunctive forms of the verb easily would have rolled, as well as the whole gallery of literary phrases that enhance the Polish and Hungarian languages. And they very likely could punctuate.

Most importantly I believe they would have said that such basic educational skills matter. Indeed, that such skills were the lifeblood of their national heritage.