“If your husband was trapped in a car, would …”

I saw this during a television commercial.

Problem:
The “If” clause should have been written in the past subjunctive mood.

Explanation:
The TV commercial was on the Discovery Health channel.

“Could You Survive?” is the title of the show that was being advertised.

The premise of the show is to ask viewers whether they would be prepared to survive in the event of a disaster or other emergency.

The complete sentence that I saw was along the lines of “If your husband was trapped in a car, would you be able to rescue him?”

The problem with this sentence is that “was” is the wrong form of the verb “be” to use in the if-clause.

The if-clause is a subordinate clause — also called a “protasis” — in this conditional sentence.

A conditional sentence discusses one of the following:

a factual implication, as in “If you cool water to 0 degrees Celsius, it freezes.”;
a hypothetical situation, as in “If you were king, would you make me a knight?”

If the hypothetical situation is described with a contrary-to-fact present conditional, then the past subjunctive must be used.

In other words, as noted at Wikipedia, the past subjunctive is used after the conjunction if to express hypotheses.

It is a common English blunder to use simply the past tense, and that is the blunder made by the TV ad writer.

Solution:
“If your husband were trapped in a car, would …”

“He sites the following historic quotes …”

I saw this recently on a website.

Problem:
The writer used the wrong verb.

Explanation:
The full sentence was “He sites the following historic quotes regarding Thanksgiving.”

The verb “site” — spelled S-I-T-E — means to place, situate or locate at or on a site.

It is clear that the writer of the sentence was trying to say “refers to” when he wrote “site” with an “s”.

So the writer should have used the verb “cite” — spelled C-I-T-E — which means to quote, especially as an authority.

Solution:
“He cites the following historic quotes …”

Verbs, Versus

I had to look up these two verbs the other day during a conference call.

Problem:
I was not sure which verb represented proper English.

Explanation:
The conference call entailed a review of verbiage to go into a Web-based application.

The review centered on how to communicate to a customer that two identities with the same company could be disconnected from one another.

One part of the document used the verb “disassociate”; another part of the document used the verb “dissociate”.

I had to look up these two verbs because I was unsure whether both were correct. Both verbs are correct and mean to remove from association.

The difference, according to at least one dictionary, is the age of the two verbs.

Solution:
Both verbs represent proper English. Use the one that you prefer, but be consistent within any given document that you are writing.