I would fix our latest grammar foible but I’m a culprit

We need to talk about the conditional tense. That’s not an example of it, by the way — rather, that’s the sexiest opening sentence of any newspaper column, anywhere — but it’s an urgent appeal nonetheless. Because suddenly the conditional tense is everywhere. Where once people went on their holidays to Kerry, now they would have gone on their holidays to Kerry. Nobody ate toast for their breakfast: they would have eaten toast. People who once would have drunk Carlsberg if no other lager was available now would have drunk Carlsberg full stop. What on Earth is going on?

Matters recently came to a head for me when I had to read 20 biographies of the shortlisted applicants for next year’s Operation Transformation. The purpose of these admirable documents is simply to convey information about the candidates — they’re not competing for any major literary awards here — but because I am unusually, probably unhealthily, obsessed with grammar, I couldn’t but notice how frequently the conditional tense was deployed in them. There’s the woman who ‘would use food as a crutch.’ Another who, since developing menopausal symptoms, ‘would wake at 2am wanting to clean.’ The man who, when he was in a healthy routine, ‘would bring overnight porridge’ to his shift work. The woman who ‘would be good’ at expressing how she feels and the one who ‘would bring her daughter to the park.’ All these people, all these conditional lives.

I shouldn’t have to explain that the conditional tense, correctly used, technically only describes stuff that never happened. I would have got a taxi but the bus came first, is a perfect if inaccurate example (the bus never comes first.) I would wake at 2am wanting to clean if I hadn’t gone to bed hammered. I would bring overnight porridge but I couldn’t be arsed. You get the idea.

As a measure of how rarely this rogue tense is actually required, consider the Modh Coinníollach, the Irish version of the conditional tense, and how you basically never really bothered learning it because it was relatively easy to get by without it.

Yet for some reason, it seems that everyone is Ireland is now hellbent on using the English conditional tense where the good old past tense once worked perfectly. Suddenly, the past is a fanciful country where nothing actually happened but a lot of things would have happened if unspecified historic events had come to pass. I have no idea why this has become a thing or whether it’s a peculiarly Irish phenomenon — I don’t speak English to enough non-Irish people to gauge its international reach — I just know that everyone around me is suddenly would having and could having where once they just did.

Worst of all — and the reason that this is now a proper state of chassis — I’ve started doing it myself. I hear myself telling people that I would have eaten a lot of Findus crispy fried pancakes as a child and I wonder who I even am. I spend so much time correcting myself as I go that I’m essentially saying everything twice now. First, I would use the wrong tense and then I used the wrong tense (though that second run-up is actually the right tense. Help me, I am going mad.)

I don’t really mind other people using crazy grammar as long as it doesn’t infect my own speech and I can judge them accordingly. When my old buddy Niall Quinn started deploying footballer’s grammar — a completely unique subset of the English language — after a few years in England, I took enormous pleasure in informing him that, contrary to his own version of events, he wasn’t ‘stood there’ or ‘sat there’ when some hilarious footbally incident happened, he was standing there or sitting there. When people tell me they do be doing things, I usually turn it into a song and their humiliation and my insufferableness are complete.

But at least do be doing isn’t an actual existential crisis. The national shift from did to would, on the other hand, undermines reality; it threatens the foundations of everything. It is no exaggeration to say that if we persevere with this abomination of the English language, we actually risk making ourselves extinct.

OK, it’s a slight exaggeration. The point is that while language evolves in all manner of wonderful and unpredictable twists and tangents, this latest development is particularly annoying, not least because it has wound its would-ing tentacles around my own larynx. And I would have liked to finish this column with a perfect usage of the conditional tense but instead, I just beg of you: lads, stop this madness now.