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    “I should!”

    I've been watching a few episodes of the BBC drama series "Foyle's War."   Its a decent show, but what interests me right now is just an expression that the main character, Christopher Foyle, often uses that I had never heard before.   It works like this:  someone will ask him if he thinks that they ought to ____, or if he wants them to ____, and he replies "I should!"

    For example "Do you want me ask all the jewelery stores in town if they've seen this necklace before?"; "I should!"  or "Do you think I should check the oil in my car?"; "I should!".

    Americans would, in a similar situation say "I would," which is short for, I take it, "If I were you I would do that."    How to get from one expression to the other is obvious:  you drop the "If I were you," and you drop the _proverb_ "do that."  "Do that," is a proverb because its anaphoric for the verb from the previous sentence, e.g. "I would do that" is anaphoric for "I would ask all the jewelry stores in town."  

    So, first question:  is this use of "I should," still idiomatic in British English?  Or have y'all degenerated to "I would" too?    

    I say "degenerated" because it's pretty clear that what's being asserted is not just a subjunctive conditional–what I _would_ do if I were you–but a subjunctive conditional about a normative claim–what normative facts would obtain if I were you.

    So the second question is, what is Foyle's "I should" actually short for.  I take it is something like:

    "If I were you, it would be the case that I should call all the jewelry stores."  (1)

    But notice that you can't even express that without the awkward "it would be the case that."      If you try to say "I would should do that," it becomes unparsable and horribly awkward.   "Should" doesn't like being embedded in a separate modal, and in fact even in (1) the brain recoils at the embedding of the "should" inside the "would."    I don't think our brains are at all comfortable with the very form of the construction.

    And yet, when Foyle says "_I_ should!"  with the right emphasis on "<b>I</b>" we have no problem understanding what he means, not even if we are Americans who have never heard that idiom before.

    I have some ideas about what this kind of example shows about language but they are fairly heretical, so I would hold off on expressing them for now. "_You_ should."

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    15 responses to ““I should!””

    1. Patrick S. O'Donnell Avatar
      Patrick S. O’Donnell

      [ A “decent” show? I think it is (was!) one of the best offerings on television. I’m not alone: http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/tv/la-et-st-foyles-war-20150203-column.html#page=1 ]

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    2. Charles Young Avatar
      Charles Young

      I was taught to use will in the first person and shall in the second and third persons to express simple futurity, and to reverse these for emphasis. Thus Fowler approvingly cites this exchange from Woodhouse: -“I will follow you to the ends of the earth.” -”That will not be necessary. I am only going to the wine cellar and shall return in fifteen minutes.” Three of the four winners.
      I should think that it is the optative should that is in play with Foyle, to be used, as shall is, in the first person.
      And Foyle’s Law is rather better than “decent.”

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    3. Eric Winsberg Avatar
      Eric Winsberg

      Haha. Ok, first of all, my apologies for using the word “decent.” I’ve only seen five episodes so far. I do think there are one or two things that keep it from being great, but I’m happy to go much higher than “decent.”
      @Charles: I hadn’t thought of that, since the word “shall” is just not even in my vocabulary. But I guess you are right. (and now I’m a bit disappointed.)

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    4. Simon Evnine Avatar
      Simon Evnine

      I had thought that it was the reverse of what Charles Young says. “I shall drown and no-one will save me” is the unfortunate victim (unemphatic uses); “I will drown and no-one shall save me” is the suicide (emphatic uses). So Foyle is simply abbreviating the unemphatic “I should [do that], if I were you.”

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    5. Eric Winsberg Avatar
      Eric Winsberg

      indeed, I was confused by Charles’ own example, as it seemed to show the opposite of what he claimed.

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    6. Eric Winsberg Avatar
      Eric Winsberg

      and for an example of how it reverses in the second person, there is Tolkien’s “You shall not pass” (which is definitely meant to convey emphasis!)

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    7. Aldo Antonelli Avatar
      Aldo Antonelli

      +1

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    8. Anon Avatar
      Anon

      Are you sure it isn’t a derivation of a different phrase? “I should!” as in “I should think so!”

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    9. Michael Kremer Avatar
      Michael Kremer

      Eric, I am not sure I share your sense that there is something obviously wrong with
      (2) If I were you, I should call all the jewelry stores.
      A google search for “If I were you, I should” yields results suggesting that this is grammatical and intelligible in some forms of English. (Searching books.google.com is particularly interesting. The first entry is from a 2001 book titled “Conditionals: A Comprehensive Empirical Analysis” in which a footnote on p. 198 tells us that of 30 examples of “If I were you, I…” 4 used “should,” 9 used “would,” and 17 used ” ‘d”. The second entry is from a 1904 edition of something called “Correct English and Current Literary Review” in which a letter to the editor is correcting a sentence in the form “If were you, I should go where you pleased” to “If I were you, I should go where I pleased” (but not correcting the “should”!). And the 6th entry is from a 2007 “Encyclopedic Graded Grammar” providing as examples of “Miscellaneous Uses of Should” the following: “If I were you, I should get the scooter serviced” and “I should do it, if I were you.”
      And, for variety, not from google books: http://www.englishgrammar.org/uses-of-should/
      “Should is often used in main clauses which are preceded or followed by a clause expressing unreal conditions.
      If I were you, I should accept this offer.
      No Sam, I shouldn’t do that, If I were you.
      Note that this kind of sentence is often used to give polite advice or gentle admonition.”

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    10. Eric Winsberg Avatar
      Eric Winsberg

      Anon: if you watch and listen, its pretty obvious that’s not it. The emphasis is on the I, as in, I don’t know about you, but I should. Its pretty clearly some kind of “If I were you” construction.
      Michael: fascinating. But if Charles and Simon are right, then how do we know if that’s a normative “should” or just the subjunctive conditional form of “shall”? I think what makes me hear “If I were you, I should” as so wrong is because I can only hear “should” as the normative construction.

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    11. Michael Kremer Avatar
      Michael Kremer

      Eric: I am guessing it is not normative. Here are some other examples from my last link:
      “Should can be used in conditional clauses expressing possibilities, suppositions etc.
      If she should come, ask her to wait.
      Should it rain, we will cancel the trip.”
      I think this is the same usage as in “If I were you, I should do that,” a subjunctive form of “shall”. But if I were you, I would/should ask the linguists.

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    12. Eric Winsberg Avatar
      Eric Winsberg

      Right. Good. Once I start hearing “should” as just another (less emphatic) form of “would” I of course have no trouble at all with “If I were you I should”
      I still think there an interesting phenomenon here, but I admit its now much more buried in conjecture: when I, an american who never uses or hears “shall” hears the expression “I should” I hear it as an acceptable contraction of (what is to me) an unacceptable longer construction, and I take it to mean something like “if I were in your place, it would behoove me to do so.” But i might be the only such person, in which case its not a very interesting find.

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    13. Charles Young Avatar
      Charles Young

      Yup, I screwed it up. My apologies. It’s all Douglas MacArthur’s fault, for saying “I shall return!” instead of “I will return!”

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    14. jdkbrown Avatar
      jdkbrown

      I hear it as literally expressing “I would do that if I were you,” and implicating the normative content: “You should do that.” (That’s what I would do, and since I’m both the boss and an awesome copper…)

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    15. Eric Winsberg Avatar
      Eric Winsberg

      that’s how I heard it at first, too–before it occured to me that “should” was just the subjunctive conditional of “shall”.
      but I think its interesting that we can hear it that way when there is no longer expression it is short for that we find acceptable except the pedantic sounding “If I were you, it would be the case that I should,” or something it cant be short for “If I were you it would behoove me to.” The only way “If I were you I should..” is acceptable and parsable is if we leave the normative interpretation aside.

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