Do You Mind If I Smoke?: The Memoirs of Fenella Fielding

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I tried to wait a couple days to see if I would feel better about Jenny’s sign, but I just couldn’t help myself.

I would suggest that correct question to pose, in this instance, would be: "Would you mind if I were to smoke here?Since the original sentence is meant to convey a request, we may notice that later is more humble than formal sentence. But don’t worry, I won’t do it again, so your mouth will need to remain shut like a rat trap until the day the undertaker buries you deep in the earth and gives the earthworms the green light to have themselves a nice little lawyer buffet. The subjunctive mood isn't really distinguishable from other moods in modern English for the most part, but it can be seen in the variant ("You would mind if I were to smoke") as the subjunctive uses "I were" rather than "I was".

The problem is that the sign is telling the public that multiple Jennys owned the café, which is just a bald-faced lie. What can you about Fenella Fielding, not only the sultry tannoy voice for the Prisoner, but a long list of film and theatre credits. However, the converse is false: the presence of "would" in the main clause does not necessarily require either a modal preterite or a subjunctive in the "if"-clause.

We are playing linguistic games here, with a very mundane question that is never subject to anything like this degree of analysis. It makes a reasonable amount of sense, when one considers that it hypothesises one event coming before another; first "I smoked" and now "you mind". could be inflected to raise my smoking as a very remote possibility, even a hypothetical of the type I don't smoke but would you mind if I did?

The same applies to smoked instead of smoke, which isn't really "past tense" there (it just means "not present tense, not here-and-now", because there are only two "tenses" in English). Love the book, so full of anecdote's and asides to an actors life that I had difficulty to put it down.In book form, I don’t think it does justice to a lovely actress, who was known to many as England's first lady of the double entendre. The flames dazzled and hypnotized me, but I soon snapped out of it and realized that I needed to get the hell out of there before Barney Fife showed up again in his little police costume. Would you mind if I smoked here= simple future tense question using conditional tense form of smoke. Jenny gazed at me and turned her head a little bit to the right, the way a dog does when it hears a high-pitched squeal. Very polite but less certain as in "I am probably going to smoke here but if you don't like it I may not do it.