Grammar, Identity, And The Dark Side Of The Subjunctive: Phuc Tran At TEDxDirigo

That spring semester of my freshman year, I took Ancient Greek on a whim, and it was brutally hard. I loved every minute of it: every accent, clause, and conjugation. The following year, I took more Greek as well as Sanskrit. That was even harder, and I loved that even more. And that following summer, I studied Latin, and by my junior year, I was studying Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit while also taking German immersion. I wasn’t restrained by ideas of what I was supposed to study or should have studied. I just pursued what I honestly loved. I embraced the indicativeness, the reality, of my passions rather than lingering on what I thought I should have been studying. The subjunctive helped me envision what I could be; it allowed me to be creative and to entertain crazy visions of “what if.” But as I unpacked all those possibilities, I also fell prey to the dark side of the subjunctive, the idea of “should have.” The idea of what “should have” didn’t improve my present or my future–it clouded my ability to see what actually was because I was fixated on what wasn’t. So much of my depression as a teenager, which verged on suicidal at times, came from how badly I wanted to be someone else. Accepting things for what they are, accepting their indicativeness, was my first step to overcoming my depression and anxiety. More important this was my first step towards honoring and loving myself and pulling away from the subjunctive’s dark side. The dark side is, after all, the more seductive–just as Star Wars has shown us.

In the Star Wars saga, the Sith Lords speak in opaque subjunctives. Darth Vader says to Luke, “If you only knew the power of the Dark Side.” Vader obviously knows how enticing the use of a present contrafactual optative sounded. And Yoda? He speaks with the bare bludgeon of the imperative and indicative. “Do or do not. There is no try.” Yoda knows how hard and uncompromising the indicative is. It takes courage to embrace the indicative–it takes real courage. And even though what Yoda says is true, Luke doesn’t stay with Yoda in the swamp because he has his own path to weave in between Yoda’s indicative truth and Vader’s seductive subjunctive. Luke has to see the world for himself through his own lens. I am presenting just one lens–a grammatical lens–through which we can all view our experience and our world. The subjunctive allows us to innovate, but it also allows us to become mired in regret. The indicative does not allow us to imagine at all, but it does allow us to talk about ourselves and our experience in real terms (especially if we have the courage to engage that reality). We all, as English speakers, put on and take off the lenses of the indicative and subjunctive everyday, and once we recognize the pitfalls of both the subjunctive and the indicative, we can actively choose a positive and more hopeful perspective.

In 2011, Gallup International conducted a survey that ranked different nations’ feelings of optimism and pessimism. What country would you expect to be the most optimistic? A country that has no subjunctive in its language? A country whose language doesn’t naturally allow its speakers to obsess over the idea of could have? According to the results of the survey, Vietnam was the most optimistic country in the world. And what country was the most pessimistic? France, of course, with its subjunctive-rich existentialism. (This is the language with two different types of subjunctives!) This is about understanding and reclaiming language and grammar, and it’s not a new idea. As a teenager living in rural Pennsylvania, I listened to the Sex Pistols hundreds of times, but I didn’t hear the nihilism of their music. When they sang their chorus of “no future for you,” I didn’t connect to the alienation of British punk. The refrain of “no future” for me meant that my future was unwritten and that many possibilities lay before me. I had re-interpreted that song of despair into a song of hope.

Go reclaim and reappropriate your language and grammar.

It’s your first and most powerful tool to experiencing and communicating the world around you, and it’s a tool that we all have. We all use the indicative and subjunctive everyday, and we can be mindful of when we’re blinded by the indicative and when we can’t see the subjunctive around us.

And this way of seeing the world? It has real force.

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