The subjunctive mood - only the form is dead

Over at Mr. Verb's eponymous blog is a delightful finger-pointing at the egregious William Safire and one of his more annoying readers:

“Get this,” Sam Pakenham-Walsh, member of the Nitpickers League, said in an e-mail message, “we no longer use the subjective tense! Has all our education been for naught?”

Yeah. "Subjective tense". He said it, and Safire didn't catch it.

Read Mr. Verb for the low-down on "tense" and "subjective". I'm posting about something else that really gets me.

Even assuming he'd said "subjunctive mood", does Pakenham really think Ferraro (or anybody) doesn't understand the difference between irrealis and realis based on their failure to use the "proper" form of the verb "to be" (the only verb which has a special form for this mood, the only one) in the construction? Of course they understand the subjunctive; they just don't know which form of the verb they're "supposed" to use to mark it. That's why the IF is there. "If he was" = "were he" nowadays. Sheesh.

I am therefore delighted that he said "subjective tense" and that Safire missed it.

Let me add this - from Arnold Zwicky's Language Log post on the matter:

While I'm on the subject of subjunctives, let me express amazement, once again, that so many people are so exercised about the use of the ordinary past rather than a special counterfactual form (often called "the subjunctive" or "the past subjunctive") for expressing conditions contrary to fact. The special counterfactual form is incredibly marginal: it's distinct from the ordinary past for only one verb in the language, BE, and then only with 1st and 3rd person singular subjects, so it does hardly any work. And using the ordinary past rather than the special counterfactual form virtually never produces expressions that will be misunderstood in context. Yes, you can construct examples that are potentially ambiguous out of context, but in actual practice there's almost never a problem, as you can see from two facts:

one, all conditionals with past tense verb forms in them, for every single verb in the language other than BE, and for BE with 2nd person or plural subjects, are potentially ambiguous out of context, yet in actual practice, there's almost never a problem; and

two, the nit-pickers are, in my experience, flawless at determining when a was in a conditional is to be understood counterfactually (and so "should be" replaced by were) -- which means that they understood the speaker's or writer's intentions perfectly.

Indeed.