Subjunctive
|
Towards more picturesque speech™
|
If I were to have been writing an article about subjunctives, what would you say?
The definition of passive progressive: someone who says, “If that construction were to have had been being used as a passive subjunctive perfect progressive, would you hold it against me? That is to say, would it have had been being held against me by you?”
In everyday usage
Brexit, and our learned friends’ nervous proclivities give us the opportunity to use this word — with its sibiliants, nasal plosives and fricatives it is quite fun to say, so it’s a shame we don’t get it out more often — in the wild, unshackled from its technical grammatical way. How so? Well — at least until some scenery munching tory rips up the European rulebook in earnest — we now have European MiFID, EMIR, and so on, and UK MiFID, EMIR and so on. In point of fact they are the same, but they are different. UK EMIR applies if you are in the UK, and EU EMIR applies if you are in the EU. But a UK counterparty treating with an EU one, we have a guaranteed conundrum: how to neatly describe applicable regulation that, in practice, applies to both but, in law, applies to only one at a time?
This issue has, presently, defeated the very finest professional wordsmiths in the English language. They resort to such toe-curling conditionals as this:
{{quote|The issuer represents that it is (i) an entity established within the European Union and accordingly shall from time to time for the time being be deemed to be, and therefore shall, for such aforementioned times be, a non-financial counterparty (for the purposes of and as such term is defined in EU EMIR) and (ii) an entity established outside the United Kingdom and therefore not subject to UK EMIR that, to the best of its knowledge and belief, having given due and proper consideration to its status, would constitute a non-financial counterparty (as such term is defined in UK EMIR) if it were established in the United Kingdom, which it is not, and were UK EMIR to apply to it, which it does, from time to time and for the time being, not.