Wedlock of the God of Love with the Gods of Grammar. An affair between two diametrically opposite personae. One God is mythological and the other(s), real. One makes you fall in love that is blind, the other makes you gape at English Grammar with eyes wide open. The God of love uses his arrows to ensnare people into love, while “the key to Wren & Martin” is possibly the only way out of the others’ Grammar Puzzles.
Rewind to a week back. This was when I reestablished contact with some of my once close friends. Once close, for time and space prevented us from keeping in touch for quite a while. We met after long, and hence were trading lessons learnt, anecdotes experienced, organizations switched, qualifications obtained and habits formed. Not to forget love stories – the ones that had happened, had not, are happening and may happen. Which is when the above wedlock happened.
For, the striking commonality in all love stories (successful or otherwise), was the grammar involved during or around the time of “the proposal”. (“Successful or otherwise” is a phrase of caution inserted intentionally to prove that success in love is relative. ‘Walking out of an affair’ has suddenly become a measure of success!) The efforts of the male partner, in setting up an ambience conducive to proposing, simply gush down the drain the moment the heroine starts her grammatical extempore –verbal game-play where even the tense used may be a “turning point”. What follows is the best of such extempores. One-liner proposals that would force any guy to put pen to paper, underline the critical parts (like we did at school: “picking out” the main clause and the subordinate ones!), and try and make sense of the jugglery. A big thanks to all my friends who were co-operative enough to share the “grammatical rewards” they were bestowed with.
· I wanted to be in love with you. – This implies that you aren’t half as good as the new bargain she has recently acquried. Further, this is a tacit admission of the fact that only half your calls will be picked up, and your messages (unless already blocked) will be deemed as important as the ones that announce “For sale! Green rabbit at half the market price! Hurry!”
· I would have been in love with you – This is the inverse corollary of the first statement. The meaning is that you would have been the “new acquistion” had matters not been so settled with our anti-hero, her present boyfriend. The conclusion? She is committed. You don’t gain anything, save an experience certificate that may provide incremental confidence on your next venture.
· I might be in love with you – No instance or incident can be quoted as evidence of the girl’s love, for the matter is still under contemplation. It’s window-shopping at its peak! ;) After all, the market has a wide variety of options. All you can do is to wait. And, at the end of the waiting period, precedents suggest that you will most probably get to hear the first or the second proposals drafted above. At the end of the story, during the “happily ever after” part, you still wouldn’t have got a girl.
· I was in love with you – Idiot, you let it go. You didn’t sense it coming. She tried her best to convey it, but then you never did your Wren and Martin properly. Continue the relationship at your own peril. Iterations will only result in one of the above three scenarios.
· To conclude, the killer proposal. This would challenge any post-graduate in English Literature to think twice before uttering a single syllable in English. Craftily framed, well delivered, to the extent that Cupid himself ran for cover!
“In the event that I fall in love with you, I will give you a call tonight.”
Speechless! So was our dude. Was he to wait for the event?! Well, he did. The event never happened. The call never came. The moment I heard this from the victim (one of my friends), I ROTBAFOL (Rolled On The Bed And Fell Off Laughing, if you want to adapt it into your chat lingo!!). The proposal reminded me of exception messages that a C program threw up whenever a geek forgot to #include (people without a programming background can safely ignore this and move on); with the exception that the latter seemed a bit more subtle and diplomatic when it mattered.
Action plan? Guys, please work on your Grammar. To the extent that, for such “legally correct” proposals as the above, we could atleast give a befitting reply. Which, for the killer proposal, would have been (!!): “In the event that I answer the call, it would mean I mightn’t be as much in love!” Confused? Leave it to the gals to figure out. We have done too much thus far...
