Hortatory Subjunctive
Much ado has, appropriately, been made of GSA head Lurita Doan’s defense of a particular statement she had made that, she claimed, was a confusion about “tense”—she had been using (she said) the “hortatory subjunctive,” rather than making a declarative statement of intention.
Now, our expertise lies in the condemnation of heretics, not in grammar. Nevertheless, this “defense” of Doan’s is at once so laughable and so wrong on so many levels that we cannot restrain ourselves from comment.
First, the “hortatory subjunctive” is a mood, not a tense. Wikipedia will tell you more than we can about what tense, mood and aspect are all about, but we can say with certainty that a mood is not a tense. And we can also agree wholeheartedly with Rep. Sarbanes, who insisted (during his questioning of Doan) that the statement in question was not an exhortation (cohortative or hortatory mood) but was, plainly and simply, a declarative statement in the future indicative.
What baffles us—aside from the whole display of utter incompetence and disregard for, well, anything worth regarding—is this puzzle: what on Earth did Lurita Doan think she would gain by tossing around five-dollar grammatical terms like “hortatory subjunctive?” Did she think it would be a good idea to make her questioners (you know, the Congress-critters who are supposed to provide her with “oversight”) feel dumb or something? Quoth Chairman Waxman, “You’ve already told us that that future tense sentence didn’t mean it because you didn’t know future tense or, you know, something about a hortatory something or other. God, I feel like Tony Soprano.”
Not, we think, the feeling one wants to inspire in the man who’s shortly going to be telling you that you’d resign if you were smart—on national TV.