Invitation: let's all be grammar Nazis. Find grammatical mistakes in JKR!

[fpb]

I think the people who disapprove of JKR's style simply have no notion of what good writing is about. JKR - I will defend this statement in an essay if I have to - has a gift for putting in just as much detail as is strictly necessary to create a setting and move the story along, and her narrative rhythm is unimproveable

Comments

[goreism]

That's an interesting sentence. I don't think it has anything to do with the subjunctive, which is mostly unused in modern English English anyway; rather, the strange thing is its use of the past tense in a relative clause following a past modal construction. I'm not sure I've seen something like it before, though I seem to remember someone pointing out that President Bush used a similar construction in a speech somewhere. I'm inclined to think it's just an error, but it bears looking for other examples when I have the time. Good find!

I disagree, though, that grammar has much to do with logic. (At least, the standard definition of "grammar," which is "the rules by which the corpus of possible utterances in a language can be generated.") For example, many English-speakers believe using a double negative for emphasis or to express a positive is "illogical," but (as you obviously know!) speakers of Romance languages use such constructions all the time, and find nothing illogical about them. (Nor should they)