I’m wondering if this one’s related to the sterotypical American male’s fear of asking directions:
Quite often, when I ask a customer if I can help him (and these cases are almost always male) to find anything, he will say something like: “If I was looking for stuff on golfing in Rhodesia, where might I be?”
There are several possible answers to this:
- “Since you present the quest as having happened in the past, I would have to know when you were looking, since the section has moved a few times.” (Yes, I may be being pedantic, but he should have said “were.”)
- “Seeing how lost you are now, if no one were to help you, you would probably be somewhere close to graphic design or, more probably, erotica.”
- “Well, we still have the bouncing crystal balls and copies of Where’s Waldo, so we can try to figure this out.”
The most effective question would be “Where are books on golfing in Rhodesia?” Of course, we would then have to know that it’s now Zimbabwe.
These questions are often accompanied by a wobbling of one hand, as if to make it even clearer that this isn’t actually something that the customer wants, but is more a vague hypothetical question as to methods of looking. Or something.
The result is to make the customer look stupider than he probably really is. Yet they apparently do this intentionally. Go figure.
(And I’m not actually sure that this is a pluperfect subjunctive. While I usually speak correctly, I can rarely remember the names for these things. Help me, Grammar Girl!)
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It is neither pluperfect aka past perfect (which would be “I had looked”) nor subjunctive (which would be “if I were looking”). English doesn’t even have a pluperfect subjunctive, though Latin did. This is plain old past progressive.
Perhaps you are thinking of the Official Joke of the City of Boston (”Can you tell me where to get schrod?” “Gee, I never heard the pluperfect subjunctive before.”)
My dad always put it, “If I were a book on playing golf on mars, where would I be.” I always liked the touch of surrealism there…
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