The disappearing subjunctive

English has shown increasingly little interest in the use of the subjunctive.   Were I to express my druthers in this, I would say that this is cause for regret. Note the subjunctive were followed by would.  I remember being impressed that in Latin you could use the subjunctive to indicate your personal lack of belief in what you were writing. The statement you were making was not necessarily one that you could guarantee was true.  So elegant!  You would think that in English we would have found some use for such a grammatical opportunity instead of leaving it in fossilised forms that are being abandoned or misunderstood.

 This seems to be the case with the construction exemplified by come Monday.

There are a few other such expressions in which the subjunctive is stranded, such as come what may, or come hell and high water.

 Come Monday I will be on holidays.  This employs the subjunctive form of come which can be roughly reworded as let Monday come to pass and I will be on holidays.  The Oxford English Dictionary describes this as come in the subjunctive preceding a date or time that tells you when something will happen.

 However in one of its shorter free dictionaries on line the same Oxford Dictionary publishing company describes come as a preposition.  Collins joins Oxford in taking this functional grammar approach . Perhaps they think that labelling come as a subjunctive is going to raise more questions than it gives answers.  Their readers won’t have a clue what the subjunctive means and will be much happier with the prospect of a preposition. 

 Come certainly fills the place that would be taken by a preposition. Come Monday. On Monday. By Monday.  But it seems to me that the subjunctive come has an airy grace that the plodding prepositional come does not have.  It loses its subtlety.