Mind your language | 26 January 2008

It is not fair to blame the Americans for every element of speech that we don’t like, but there are a couple of pieces of syntax that have blown like some New World bacterium over our islands and have grown on the blank petri dishes of the English mind. (I was going to say ‘like avian influenza’, but my husband tells me that bird flu is a virus and viruses don’t grow in petri dishes.)
One of them is the construction exemplified thus: ‘It is to his own benefit that he [should] understand how to mend the car.’ The word should does not always occur, and the general supposition is that understand is a subjunctive. In British English, the thought would be more normally clothed in the construction: ‘It is to his own benefit for him to understand how to mend the car.’ A similar importation of modal verb forms is often to be heard when Americans, and now British people, deliver conditional statements (using the word if).