Quote:
Originally Posted by VydorScope
So in a dialog between two characters the one says something like "Yeah, we have this bad problem" and the other guy says:
If that were only the case, I would be overjoyed.
Meaning "If that was the problem, things would be easy, but it is not."
My wife has not heard that expression before so I am wondering if I dreamed it or not.  |
Absolutely correct. It's the subjunctive mood, which is used to express a hypothetical or wished-for situation. Here it's correct because the implication is "that's actually NOT the problem". Using "was" rather than "were" would be poor grammar. Of course, since this is dialogue, you may simply decide that "was" is OK, because almost nobody speaks using grammatically correct English. In a non-dialogue passage, though, it would just be plain wrong not to use the subjunctive.