I may (or should that be ‘might’?) be getting ahead of myself here, but if we’re going to have to get used to hearing this word on an even more regular basis, we might (or should that be ‘may’?) as well make sure we use it right.
(Or should that be ‘correctly’?)
Funny little word, ‘may’. A Yorkshire terrier of a word, it causes a lot more trouble than its size warrants. May has a multitude of meanings (ok, four meanings), all of them full of possibility, if somewhat tricky to define. There’s the merry, merry month, which can either be the most delightful month of all – sunny, warm, verdant and brimming with all the fecund juiciness of spring – or a bitter winter hangover, its darling buds shaken by rough Shakespearean winds as the mercury barely dares to dabble in double figures.
But let’s not talk about the weather. There’s more to May than that.
There’s the ‘let’ meaning, as in ‘May the best candidate win’. There’s the ‘can’ meaning, as in ‘May the last one out turn off the lights?’. And then there’s the ‘could’ meaning, as in ‘This may be the end of the world as we know it’.
All good and simple.
But that’s not actually the case, is it? If it was, we wouldn’t use ‘may’ at all, we’d used ‘let’, ‘can’ and ‘could’ all the time. We don’t because ‘may’, like so many words in the English language, has a subtle nuance that makes it the exact right word for certain situations. ‘May the best team win’ doesn’t mean quite the same as ‘let the best team win’, does it? It means something more akin to ‘Let the fates make it come to pass that the best team wins.’
In other words, with May there’s an implied sense of uncertainty.
Now there’s a campaign slogan if ever I saw one.
