The Grammarnator has been thinking about verbs recently, two uses of them, to be exact, one in the Monitor and one in the New York Times.
The Monitor’s was a comment by an ordinary American about what seemed to be the widespread practice of taking time off from work to watch the United States in the World Cup: “If we would have lost and gotten knocked out, I would have second-guessed missing out on work.”
Now “missing out on work” and simply “missing work” are different matters, which complicates the writer’s idea of what second-guessing something means, but what grabbed my attention was the opening “would have.”
This usage has lately become as widespread as taking time off to catch the local team, and you hear it most of all from the mouth of announcers and commentators at sporting events.
A typical example: “If he would have tucked the ball and run, he could have made the first down.”
And whenever I hear something like that, I say to myself, “If he had run. . . .” Likewise with the statement in the Monitor: “If we had lost. . . .” Try the entire sentences with those beginnings and see if they seem smoother and clearer to you.
I am at a loss about why this usage has taken hold, but I know that the best way to avoid it is tell yourself to use “would have” only once in a sentence and not put “if” before it. For example:
“If Brazilians had imagined a 5-0 deficit against Germany after 30 minutes, they would have stayed home.” Or, if you prefer it at the beginning “I would have taken back roads if I had known about the construction on the highway.”
To get technical about it, those who know grammatical terminology will realize that “would have” is in the main clause, while the subordinate clause – the one with “if,” the conditional clause – uses the simple past tense in the first case and the past perfect in the second.
The past perfect is the focus of the problem in the Times, but I fear that overload threatens, so I will save that for next week.
