Tuesday, September 27, 2005

When 'Might' Makes Wrong

I blame all those moms and grade-school teachers who correct "Can I go to the bathroom?" to "May I go to the bathroom?" -- not for being wrong (it's a legitimate distinction), but for making us so vigilant about the "permission" connotation of may that we sometimes steer around the word in non-permission usages and crash into a misuse of might.

A minor problem is that might, according to some, expresses a lesser degree of probability than may. The big problem is "might have." "I may have left the keys in the car" leaves open the possibility that the keys are in the car. "I might have left the keys in the car" suggests that the catastrophe was averted, as in "I might have left the keys in the car . . . if you hadn't alerted me."

There are cases, as Bryan Garner points out, in which the issue of permission does present ambiguity. He points to "You may not come with me" as a case in which might would solve the problem. In general, however, use might, and especially might have, with caution.


7 comments:

Bill said...

Yes, Stephen, all words mean all things. I was never one for the "may I" crap myself in speech, but of course it's technically different from "can I."

Not sure how you get around the fact that "might" is the past tense of "may."

Dr Zen said...

On can/may, I'm with Stephen. The distinction is unbearably pedantic.

On the other, there are quite simply two uses of might: one, as a possible state that could exist with a degree of probability further removed than "may", the other as an indication of a possible state that did not exist.

"I might have left the keys in the car" is perfectly possible for me. It means, tout court, it is possible that I left them there but perhaps not likely.

Perhaps it is an American English thing? American English has some few elements that are conservative. For instance, few in the UK would use the subjunctive. I'm in Australia, and here, too, people are just a bit more conservative. I do see "may" quite often where I would expect "might".

Bill said...

I might have gone to the party. (... if I had known about it.)

I may have gone to the party. (... if so, I drank so much I don't remember.)

Yes, it's a small point. That's what I do.

But, come on -- I have always said "Can I?" rather than "May I?," because I'm just not that prissy (I have also never said "lie down" when "lay down" would do), but I cannot imagine a level of written English so informal that one would use "can" to mean "has permission to."

Bill said...

A real-world "might" example (from Clusterfuck Nation, the excellent James Kunstler blog). The first sentence, to me, strongly implies "... but, alas, it didn't":

Rita might have spared the nation's fourth biggest metroplex, and most of the chemical-cracking infrastructure on-shore around it. But clawing up between Beaumont and Lake Charles, she cut a path through the densest concentration of offshore oil and gas rigs in the whole Gulf of Mexico.

Brida Connolly said...

Speaking of pedantic....

"Modal auxiliaries"? "Epistemic modality"? I've been editing copy many a long year, and I'd never throw around such ridiculous terms (except possibly when I'm trying to scare an author).

Or are these merely correct terms, with very particular meanings that can't be expressed precisely by other words? I'd understand that. I feel the same way about "can," "may" and "might."

Bill said...

Heh. That expresses a thought that's been bouncing around my head recently: If descriptivists are so darn forgiving of every popular attempt at usage that even comes close to expressing its meaning, why don't they realize that copy editors mean something different than most people when they toss around terms such as "incorrect"?

Brida Connolly said...

You obviously didn't understand my response, Stephen, which for some reason I find less than astonishing. It was perfectly clear, and, indeed, Bill understood me.

I'm not going to defend myself otherwise, since I think you're kind of silly.

(Am I feeding a troll? Sorry about that. I'm done on this thread.)