The vocabulary of looking back
Eight terms. Match each to what it means.
Four ways of imagining otherwise
Four texts about alternatives that did not happen. Read for what each one wants, then read again for the forms — every text uses wish or if only, and one of them uses them wrongly throughout.
A · From a short speculative piece
In this version I took the job in Manchester. I have been here eleven years now and I have the same three friends I would have had anyway, because it turns out I make friends in the same way in every city.
The flat is bigger. The winters are worse. I wish I could tell you the difference was dramatic; it is a slightly different set of small rooms and the same person walking between them, thinking about the same four things.
The one real difference is that I never met Rafa, and I do not know that. That is the trick of it — in this version I have no idea what I am missing, and I am, on the whole, fine.
B · From a personal essay
The regret is not the one people expect. I do not wish I had taken the other job; I have no idea whether that would have been better, and neither does anybody else. What I wish is that I had told them why I was leaving.
I wrote three sentences on a form. I had eleven things to say and I said none of them, because the person who would read it had been kind to me and I did not want the last thing I ever gave her to be a complaint. So she never found out that the rota was the problem. Two more people left after me for the same reason, and she is probably still solving the wrong thing.
That is the shape of most real regrets, I think. Not the road not taken. The thing not said, in a room, to somebody who could have acted on it.
C · A historian, on counterfactuals
Historians are divided about counterfactual history, and the division is not really about whether it is respectable. It is about one rule that separates the useful cases from the rest.
A counterfactual is worth entertaining if it takes a single change. What if the message had arrived an hour earlier? What if it had rained that morning? Those are questions two people can argue about, because everything else in the world stays where it was and the disagreement is about one causal link.
What if the printing press had never been invented? That is not an argument, it is a mood. Everything downstream of it has to be reimagined at once, and there is no way for either of us to be wrong — which is the tell. A hypothesis nobody can lose is not a hypothesis.
The rule is sometimes called minimal rewrite. It is not a rule about imagination. It is a rule about arguability.
D · From a comment thread
if only the internet was never invented everything would be so much better
Honestly I wish I would have been born in the 1800s, life was simpler back then
imagine if dinosaurs were still alive lol
I wish I was rich, then none of this would matter
if only my parents had made me learn the piano, I would be a totally different person now
Eight statements. Decide which text each is true of. A text may be the answer more than once.
A The speculative piece
B The personal essay
C The historian
D The comment thread
1. Argues that a counterfactual nobody can lose is not worth having.
2. Contains a form of wish that does not exist in English.
3. Says the narrator cannot know what the alternative would have contained.
4. Rejects the obvious regret in order to name a smaller and more specific one.
5. Claims that most real regrets are about something unsaid rather than a road untaken.
6. Distinguishes between a question you can argue about and a mood.
7. Describes an alternative life in which almost nothing is different.
8. Imagines a change so large that everything else would have to move with it.
Read D again with the rule from C in your hand. Four of the five comments ask for a change so large that nothing downstream of it can be reasoned about at all. The fifth — if only my parents had made me learn the piano — takes one change, and is the only one anybody could argue with.
Two of the comments also use forms that do not exist. Find them; the practice below will not tell you which they are.
A fifth text, with four sentences missing
Four sentences have been removed. Put each one back where it belongs.
We chose the flat by tossing a coin. Two flats, both fine, both the same price, and after four weekends of looking we had genuinely stopped being able to tell them apart. [1]
I have thought about that coin more than is reasonable. The other flat was four streets away and above a bakery. [2] It is the same city, the same job, the same people, the same walk to the station.
[3] And yet the woman who lives below us is now one of the two people I would ring at three in the morning, and in the other version of this I have never met her.
So I do not wish we had chosen differently. [4]
Which is, I think, the only honest position available about any of it.
Two years and sixty minutes
Eight gaps. Choose the form that fits what the writer means.
We have not spoken for two years. If only I that message when I was angry — but I did send it, and there is no unsending. She, for her part, something at the time instead of nothing; she told me so last year, which was generous of her. Now I my emails, and she does not, and I am aware that this is a complaint about somebody who owes me nothing. I do not go back, because you cannot, and anybody who tells you otherwise is selling something. What I actually an hour before pressing send. One hour. If somebody me at the time that the whole thing turned on sixty minutes, I would have laughed. I laugh about it now, and I cannot, quite. And I taller, incidentally, which is the kind of wish that costs nothing and changes nothing — and I notice I make far more of those than the other kind.
Eight sentences. Seven need work; one is correct as written.
1. If only the internet was never invented.
2. I wish I would have been born in the 1800s.
3. I wish she will call me back.
4. I wish I would remember people’s names.
5. If only I know what she meant by that.
6. He wishes he would have gone to the funeral.
7. I wish I had said something at the time. — correct as written
8. I wish it wouldn’t have rained on the day.
Minimal rewrite
Task card · Speaking · Pairs · 12 minutes
The five comments in text D, plus three of your own. Most of them cannot be argued about. Your job is to make them arguable.
Turn each unusable counterfactual into one that takes a single change — and then actually argue about one.
- 4 minutes: take three of the comments from D and rewrite each as a counterfactual with one change. If only the internet had never been invented becomes something like if only that one feature had never been added.
- 3 minutes: write two of your own about your own life — one that takes a single change, and one that is honestly a mood. Say which is which.
- 5 minutes: choose the single most arguable one between you, and argue about it. One of you says it would have made no difference; the other says it would.
- Rule: whoever appeals to something outside the one change loses the point. Everything else would have been different too is a concession, not an argument.
Why this is worth twelve minutes. The unarguable counterfactual is not a harmless daydream: it is where regret goes to be safe. If only I had been born somewhere else can never be tested and never has to be acted on. If only I had sent that email an hour later can be, and usually is.
Which ones survived
Two questions.
1. What happened when you cut a big counterfactual down to one change?
2. Of your own two, which was easier to write?
One change
Two questions. Twenty seconds.
1. What makes a counterfactual worth entertaining?
2. What form does if only take for a past event?
Next. The three patterns taken apart properly — present, past and the one that is not about time at all — and what happens to were when the sentence gets careful.