Hortatory Subjunctive

Posted on 6/14/2007 by Al Swearengen

(h/t TPM Muckraker) Four years of Latin for me in high school didn’t put me anywhere near the level John Sarbanes is communicating from, but it was pretty cool to see this and know what they were talking about. Laurita Doan thought that she was smarter than everyone else in the room….

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4 Responses to Hortatory Subjunctive

  1. bmili says:
    6/14/2007 at 10:53 pm

    im not sure what the overall discussion was about but reminds me of high school english, always hated that stuff. didnt know sarbanes was so young either, is that the same one that wrote sarbanes-oxley or did that one retire?

  2. Al Swearengen says:
    6/14/2007 at 11:12 pm

    That was his father I think. Paul Sarbanes was the senator, and he retired last year. His son is as smart as they come. The Democrats have a couple of young reps who are sharp as hell. Tim Ryan from Ohio is another one that comes to mind. When guys like him and Sarbanes move up into the leadership eventually, they’ll be a lot more effective than the leadership Dems have in congress today.

    Rahm Emanuel is given all the limelight…but I think these two guys are higher quality and a LOT more authentic than he.

  3. Neal Deesit says:
    6/15/2007 at 2:30 am

    You should be relieved that you are not “at the level that John Sarbanes is communicating from,” because he is definitely not “as smart as they come.”

    Smarter people know that the subjunctive is not, as Mr. Sarbanes asserts, a verb tense, which specifies whether the verb refers to action in the past, present, or future.

    Smarter people know that the subjunctive is a mood, a property of verbs that indicates the attitude of the speaker about the factuality or likelihood of what is expressed. And they know that Laurita Doan’s sentence “How can we help our candidates?” is neither hortatory or subjunctive.

    In this clip, an offhanded ignoramus, Ms. Doan, is being “corrected” by the pompous, slightly less ignorant Mr. Sarbanes, who as the son of a Latin teacher should either know the grammar, or at least know that he doesn’t know it well enough to pretend to be an authority.

    One hopes that Mr. Sarbanes will be more attentive to the subtleties of legislation, and not merely rely on his acumen as the son of a Latin Teacher.

  4. Al Swearengen says:
    6/15/2007 at 2:59 am

    I remember the subjunctive being, as you pointed out Neal, expression of a mood, command, desire, etc….though I do agree with Sarbanes that “How can we help our candidates?” is as close to hortatory subjunctive as anything else that was said by Doan on the record. She might as well have said “Let us figure out how to use GSA to win elections for the GOP.”

    Remove the three prepositional phrases and that is hortatory subjunctive. “Let us figure out how” vs. “How can we”

    I think you’re being hard on Sarbanes here…it was Doan that brought up hortatory subjunctive to describe a sentence that he correctly identified as future tense.

    Was she trying to go “big time” on them, or was it just her being a brat? That’s what I was trying to figure out. From the clips I saw yesterday, it seemed like she was trying to antagonize the committee at various times.

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