Wordwatch: May and Might
“Without 1819, we may never have been launched on the path to nationhood as we know it today” – Lee Hsien Loong, prime minister of Singapore 2019, quoted in London Review of Books, March 2021.
This is a new confusion, less than twenty-five years old, I think. It is very irritating, and has attracted much comment. Kingsley Amis registered his distress at it in The King’s English, 1997, so there’s probably no need for me to reiterate the complaint, except that I find the development peculiarly worrying. The difference in usage between the two words ‘may’ and ‘might’ is quite clear to anyone who has any grammatical sense (though it is actually difficult to explain or define). The reason must be that no one is taught grammar any more. But writers of a generation who surely were, now frequently make the mistake, by the cultural osmosis that governs so much English usage.
‘May’ can refer to the present or the future, but not the past: “The recipients of rebuke would curse and swear under their breath, and may even ignore it, but … no adult … would have been afraid to confront a stroppy teenager” (Spectator, August 2003). The sentence is all in the past tense, so ‘may’ should be ‘might’.
I think the confusion stems from the possibility of alternating between them in a sentence like “I may attend the meeting”, and “I might attend the meeting”, where they are genuinely interchangeable – though with a slight shift in the second towards greater uncertainty. But although that involves the same construction, it expresses a personal ambivalence as to intention, rather than an objective evaluation of external circumstances.
“… it wasn’t until 1.45 a.m. that the police went into the property to discover that the woman, [her] husband and …son were dead. She may have been better off phoning her dad” (Spectator, 6 December 2003). Since the woman was no longer alive at the time of writing, the suggestion of the present tense in relation to her action is particularly inappropriate.
“… passengers refused to board the plane after seeing petrol leaking from its engines, fearing it may have caught fire.” – BBC News, 4 April 2005. No, it didn’t catch fire – but it might have done so. Once again, the past tense in which the sentence is cast should dictate the tense of the conditional verb.
To see how ambiguous the misuse of’ ‘may’ can be, look at this, from a headline in Daily Telegraph, April 2007: “Yacht deaths “may have been avoided””. This suggests there is doubt as to whether the deaths were avoided or not. But the intended meaning is, I suppose, that the deaths could (‘might’) have been avoided (if circumstances had been different).
A related matter is the distinction between ‘will’ and ‘would’. I didn’t know this was a problem but in Australia, at least, it seems to be. “We have a saying – if everyone in Australia became a toad-buster, the [cane] toads will eventually be busted” – D. Telegraph, 13 March 2007.
Here the writer is trying to use the subjunctive after the conditional ‘if’, i.e. ‘would’, and failing, I think because any construction with the subjunctive has become alien in the last few decades. In both constructions – with ‘may’ and ‘will’ – we come up against a modern tendency to simplify syntax, which isn’t in itself something to criticise. But when the simplification leads to the kind of muddle my examples illustrate, perhaps we should avoid it.