Robert Frank - The Economic Naturalist: In Search of Explanations for Everyday Enigmas

W hen I first started teaching introductory economics, a senior colleague advised me to begin each class with a joke. It would start students off in a good mood, he explained, and make them more receptive to the ensuing lecture. I never followed his advice. It wasnt that I thought he was wrong in principle. Rather, I thought it would be too hard to come up with a relevant joke each time and felt that telling an irrelevant one would just be pandering.

As luck would have it, however, I stumbled upon a joke that seems just the right vehicle to launch this book. The joke is set in Boston, a city known for its learned cab drivers, many of them dropouts from Harvard and MIT:

A woman lands at Logan Airport, grabs her luggage, and jumps into a cab, hungry for a good New England seafood dinner. Take me to a place where I can get scrod, she tells the driver.

Eyebrow arched, the cabbie turns and says, Thats the first time Ive heard anyone say that in the pluperfect subjunctive.

Few people actually know what the pluperfect subjunctive tense is. I didnt, or didnt realize I did, so I looked it up on ASK JEEVES:

The pluperfect subjunctive (or past perfect subjunctive) tense is used to express a hypothetical situation or an action which is contrary to reality. In this case, the verb in the main clause is conjugated in the conditional form and it is necessary to use the subjunctive in the subordinate clause.

Heres an example that will be familiar to New York Yankees fans from the late 1990s, when Chuck Knoblauch, the teams second baseman, inexplicably lost his ability to complete the short throw to first baseman Tino Martinez: The Yankees would have been out of the inning if Knoblauch had made the throw to first.

As is clear from the definition and example, the woman in the joke didnt actually use the pluperfect subjective tense at all. If the joke works, it is only because most of us havent the foggiest idea what this tense is.

Does it matter? Some psychologists once theorized that people couldnt engage in clear counterfactual thinking unless they knew the technical details of the various subjunctive tenses. But this claim doesnt withstand scrutiny. Notice, for instance, that although most American sports announcers dont seem to know the pluperfect subjunctive (or at least choose not to use it), they manage just fine with counterfactual reasoning. Thus, as Yankees announcer Bobby Murcer used to say during those games in the late 1990s, Knoblauch makes that throw, theyre out of the inning.

Knowing about the pluperfect subjunctive is not a bad thing. But if learning to speak a new language is your goal, the time and effort required to learn the explicit technical details of this tense would be far better spent in other ways. Courses that focus most of their energy on such details are no fun for students, and theyre also astonishingly ineffective.