‘I’m with the King,’ said my husband. The king in question was Kingsley Amis, whose choleric The King’s English was published posthumously in 1997. The joke in the title depended on knowing two things: that there was an earlier book on English usage of that name (by the brothers H.W. and F.G. Fowler, 1906) and that a nickname of Amis’s was the King. Among those who bought the book, more, I’d think, might have been aware of the former.
The point on which my husband was with the King is this: ‘Not many people used to reading could fail to spot that something is wrong in the sentence “If Napoleon had been at his best on the day of Waterloo, the result of the battle may have been different”.’
The first thing wrong is that the result was not different, so might should have been used.
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