Past Tense "Must be"

Hi, this is my sentence: "It became for me the standard against which all cucumber must be judged."

Is "must be" present tense? Would I be better served replacing it with "would be?" Thank you.

 

I'd go with 'would', for what it's worth. Just sounds better and maintains a consistent tense. Not that 'must' breaks it, strictly speaking.

 

"It became, for me, the standard against which all cucumber had to be judged."

 

I just spent a minute working the answer to the original post out. In answer, I arrived at an exact replica of @Infel 's post. Doh. Don't judge me.


eta – although I so wanted to put a 's' on the end of cucumber

 

Aside from perhaps a sense of harshness with the use of imperative, I don't see anything wrong with it myself, as the becoming is past tense but the standard is going to carry into the future.

 

Ha! I felt the same perplexity myself while translating my work. Asked for help in a language forum and everything. "Must" is present and past tense, something about it being a defective verb. The word is always must whether the sentence is in the present or past tense. Takes a while getting used to it but since then I've noticed that good authors use it in the past tense too.
In other words, there's no past tense of "must". It's always "must".

 

I would also lose the split infinitive. "For me, it became the standard by which all cucumber must be judged."

 

For me it's not the question of tense but of the meaning behind, which would dictate my choice of words:

- must be: implies an outside force who maintains that cucumbers have to be judged. Or else.
- would be: implies an outside force but less harshly. There needn't necessarily be a penalty.
- should be: implies that anything goes. No penalty, just nicety dictates if cucumbers are judged against the standard.

Subtle differences, I know

 

For me, it came to be the standard by which all cucumber was judged.

 

I have to say, shouldn't we be using plurals here?

"For me, it became the standard against which all cucumbers must be judged."

That or "any cucumber".

 

I've never known "cucumber" to be the term for plurality.

 

I'd go with @Pinkymcfiddle 's sentence, dropping the split infinitive. But I'd definitely say 'all cucumbers.' You wouldn't say 'all car must be judged, would you? 'All' implies the plural, and the plural of cucumber is cucumbers.

However, you COULD say :
"For me, it became the standard by which cucumber must be judged." But that's a bit more fanciful, isn't it?

I like @Lifeline's explanation regarding 'must.' Spot-on.

 

Ah! So that's a split infinitive, when you use "for me" after the verb? Ah, ok, I had never understood what it meant before. Thanks, and I hope I'll remember this. (But I won't hope very hard, grammar terms simply evaporate from my mind.)
It may be an influence from my native language but I like split infinitives. It makes a sentence more complex, which I like. In fact, I expect complex sentences from a writer.

 

I agree, they have their place. "To boldly go where no one has gone before", sounds better than "to go boldly where no one has gone before".

 

I agree that "cucumbers" sounds better, and that's what I'd use, but for the sake of argument, many foods can go from count to non-count when they are subdivided. Cucumber loses its shape when sliced, diced, or grated, but doesn't otherwise lose any essential cucumberishness (it's a word), whereas there's a point when a car, by being subdivided, ceases to be a car.

But yeah, cucumbers unless otherwise specified.

 

Just a few points that no one else has mentioned... unless I misread something...

1. In its archaic form, the split infinitive would have been separated from the rest of the sentence by commas. Since the 1980s, when the magazine editor approach to sentence structure came to dominate, those commas have been dropped but—for some—creates confusion and that's why there's been a move toward not splitting infinitives. In this particular sentence, however, the casual reader will likely understand the meaning either way.
2. I think most grammarians these days would see using the singular of 'cucumber' as archaic as well, although it was accepted without (much) question until the last 30 or 40 years. The singular form eludes to 'cucumber' as a concept of personification in a way similar to how Native American societies speak of 'crow' or 'wolf.'
3. Since the story seems to put a great importance on cucumbers, I'm picturing a story set in a pastoral society and since pastoral societies often use archaic forms of speech, I think the singular makes sense in context.

 

I'd go with "must" if your intent is to convey that there is no option but to judge according to that standard, and "would" if other options are available. "Should" implies options, but recommends one over the others.

A woman "must" wear clothes in church (at least the ones I go to), she "should" wear a hat if it's a large European Catholic church on a High Holy Day (while she probably wouldn't be refused admittance if she didn't, she would certainly draw attention to herself), and she "would" presumably dress to suit the weather.

As for the taboo on split infinitives, I thought that went out with spats and buggy whips. I remember a story about how James Thurber used a split infinitive in a New Yorker article and an editor "corrected" it. When Thurber heard about it, he shot back with "When I split an infinitive, it's going to damn well stay split!"