After the merger of Fastco and Celeriton, the CFO of Fastco has been

Question

Hi Mike,

When I was reading your blog about 'However', I bumped into the following sentence:

1) After the merger of Fastco and Celeriton, the CFO of Fastco has been charged with reporting the earnings of the employees of both companies, and  however he may choose to do so , he will have to abide by relevant state tax laws.

(A) however he may choose to do so

(B) in order to choose to do so

(C) in whatever ways he is choosing to do this

(D) by choosing to do this

(E) when he chooses to do so

I have 2 questions:

1- According to discussion in the blog, Choices B & E chanage the meaning. I think 'choice A' also does the same. can you clarify please.

2- It is mentioned that choice A contains subjunctive. But I did not find any subjective mode as I know such as 'might', 'would'..etc. Can you please elaborate.

Thanks

mikemcgarry · Answer

Dear Mo2men I'm happy to respond. :-)

I am a bit puzzled about how you think that the prompt changes the meaning, since all changes in meaning refer back to the original meaning conveyed by the prompt. Here's the prompt version: After the merger of Fastco and Celeriton, the CFO of Fastco has been charged with reporting the earnings of the employees of both companies, and however he may choose to do so, he will have to abide by relevant state tax laws . This prompt conveys the facts (1) the CFO of Fastco has to report the earnings of all the employees of both companies (2) apparently, the CFO has some degree of choice about how to report these earning (3) there are relevant state laws that limit the CFO's choices All of this is conveyed clearly in the prompt and is the meaning of the sentence. I'm not clear on your objection. Please elaborate. As for the second point, that was a typo. The original version of the sentence contained the subjunctive "... however he choose to do so ..." but we edited that out before we published the blog. Evidently, we forgot to edit the TE as well: I just edited it now, to remove that reference to the subjunctive. Thank you for pointing this out. Mike :-)

Mo2men · Answer

Dear Mike,

Thanks for your response. When I took a closer look I understood Choice B has different meaning. But I have doubt that choice E is close in meaning to choice A. In interpret Choice E: When he choose the time to report the earning, he will abide by rules.

What do I miss here?

thanks in advance

mikemcgarry · Answer

Dear Mo2men , I'm happy to respond. :-)

Choice (E) is subtle: it's not a blatant change in meaning. It's clear from the prompt that CFO gets choice, at least some choice, about how he will report the earnings. What's not clear is whether he has choice about when he will report the earnings. Often, folks in the business world work under strict time deadlines, especially where numbers for a financial plan are concerned. Choice (E) seems to imply that the CFO has a certain amount of choice about when he will report the earnings, and it's not clear from the prompt sentence that this is case. If there were no statement of the idea of choice, if (E) were simply " when he does so ," that would be free of problematic implications, but even this doesn't imply the choice of method present in Choice (A). Part of the meaning in (A) is that the CFO gets at least some choice about the methods he will use, about how he will report the earnings, and this part of the meaning is lacking from these versions. Does this make sense? Mike :-)

After the merger of Fastco and Celeriton, the CFO of Fastco has been

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