it were
When could I (or should I) use "it were" as in the following sentende?
"Certainly for admirers of its star, the consistently reliable Aaron Eckhart, who plays Nick Naylor, the fast-jiving, fast-running cigarette lobbyist who holds the story together even as he almost falls apart, there is something rather nice about lighting up together, as it were, even by proxy."
"As it were" in this sense means the same thing as "in a manner of speaking" -- calling attention to the fact that you are using an ironic metaphor (lighting up together with a cigarette lobbyist).
I put this sentence in 'Word' and then did a Grammar and Spelling check. I was hoping it would say something like: This sentence is much too long.
I find sentence like that, quite difficult to read. I think that it is much better to have much shorter sentences. Sentences that only contain one idea.
"Certainly for admirers of its star, the consistently reliable Aaron Eckhart, who plays Nick Naylor, the fast-jiving, fast-running cigarette lobbyist. Nick Naylor holds the story together even as he almost falls apart. There is something rather nice about lighting up together, as it were, even by proxy."
what kind of question is this
Uriel, I was having problems with these sentence because "it were" sounded a little strange to me. I couldn't find anything about it. I wanted to hear something about it from you.
"it were" is in the subjunctive mood. Uriel has a good practical explanation. The subjunctive mood appears is several languages and is used to express a condition that is improbable or impossible. Thus the old song "I wish I were a princess" which is particularly unlikely in my case.
This isn't mine:
Uriel Wed Sep 06, 2006 2:44 pm GMT
what kind of question is this
As you can probably tell form the lack of capitalization and punctuation.
Anyway, I use "as it were", "if it were me" etc. in normal speech. It grates on me to hear people replace "were" in those cases with "was", as if they were saying "it was" or "I was" -- the "were" is a special usage that would be ungrammatical in most sentence constructions, but in the subjuctive, as Ken points out, it IS the correct one.
>>Anyway, I use "as it were", "if it were me" etc. in normal speech. It grates on me to hear people replace "were" in those cases with "was", as if they were saying "it was" or "I was" -- the "were" is a special usage that would be ungrammatical in most sentence constructions, but in the subjuctive, as Ken points out, it IS the correct one.<<
I have to agree, and I myself tend to find the use of "was" where I would expect "were" to be rather off in the very least if not somewhat grating. Note though that I will use "was" on occasion in such cases, but such has a special meaning in that it is explicitly past tense and often implies perfect aspect, unlike "were".