Owen—Hybrid Parts of Speech. 
247 
“who,” that, in a secondary function, “men” is the subject of 
“strive”. The subjunctive “succeed,” by its inflection for per¬ 
son and number (in any well inflected language), lays claim 
to a plural, third-personal subject; and the only one that offers 
“men” in a primary function. It follows that what is ob¬ 
ject of “imagine” (which requires an object) must be “(men) 
succeed” and not “(men) [to be] worse”—a conclusion aided 
by the use of “that,” which indicates the substantive usage of 
(men) succeed”. 
The adequacy of the subjunctive and the inadequacy of the 
infinitive, being foreseen by the master of linguistic mechanism, 
are accordingly the grounds for what may rank as a deliber¬ 
ate choice between them, uninfluenced by thought itself, re¬ 
garded either in its content or in its architecture—influenced 
only by respective advantages of structure-exhibition. 
The preceding illustration exhibits a particular variety of 
the verbal noun (the infinitive) in its bungling. Sometimes a 
given variety of the verbal noun exhibits a veritable flinching, 
when confronted with excessive expressional difficulty. To 
illustrate, “The boy ran away without his father’s knowledge,” 
an expression into which I wish to introduce the father’s ab¬ 
sence from home. Moreover, being a reporter, I wish, for the 
sake of conforming to journalistic fashion—as well as for the 
sake of the extra penny a line—to expand the father’s knowl¬ 
edge into a knowing “the sad occurrence to have happened.” 
Accordingly, “The boy ran away from home without his 
father’s, who was out of town, knowledge of the sad occurrence 
to have happened.” 
This expression has so small a chance of being tolerated, or 
even understood, that it w r ould hardly be ventured even by the 
bravest of the linguistically brave. Yet the difficulties insuper¬ 
able by the quasi-verbal “knowledge”—difficulties unattempted, 
even by the more effective “knowing” and “to know”—are the 
merest child’s play to any subjunctively active language. Such 
a language would substitute “The boy ran away from home 
without that (dass, que) his father, who was out of town, knew 
(wusste, sut) the sad occurrence to have happened.” 
