You're quite right, of course, I'm quite good at reacting, but not so good at initiating. For that we need you and H.S., both of you sending me off to pastures new. To be honest I had only the vaguest idea of what fossilised expressions were.

Googling 'genitive s or of construction' brings up a couple of academic papers, and a discussion at Stack Exchange, where's a useful summary from Burchfield's entry in the third edition of Fowler's. One of the papers also suggests that 's use is increasing with inanimate objects.

In another academic paper (which I can't find now) there was a comment that the 'of' construction was almost endless in its possibilities.

Just looking back at the earlier discussion, I notice that much of it was about "a policeman's car" or "the car of a policeman", neither of which I can imagine myself saying. As you pointed out in your first comment, there is often a third alternative (and before anyone complains,
yes, you can have more than two alternatives): the compound noun, and unless talking about a particular policeman, as has already been pointed out, most of us would say, "a police car".

Which leads us into the territory of "a wine glass" vs "a glass of wine", and the less obvious "the car door" but the "car's engine / the engine of the car", etc.

I was thinking about personnel, for example when when talking about the directors of a particulat company, for example when they announce a decision:

"The company's directors / The directors of the company" - (but probably not "the company directors)" - the complete group

"A company director / A director of the company", (but not "a company's director") - 1 individual

I think the same would go for "employee(s) / the company""member(s) / the team / board" etc.

Scope for endless research here.

Damn, I was sure I had removed that 's'.

Thanks you, jayles. I think we can just say 'of' describes a relationship between two nouns. As well as partitives and the others you've mentioned, most of the following, I think, only or mainly take the 'of' construction:

Groups - a pack of hounds, a gang of thieves, a crowd of tourists
Origin - Robin of Loxley, the men of Harlech
Measures - a pint of beer, a kilo of potatoes (maybe these are included in partitives)
Time expressions - the time of the incident, the day of her wedding, the age of reason
Nouns describing others - that idiot of a boy, a genius of a man
Position - the top of the page, the back of the bus, the end of the book (but the book's ending is OK)
Descriptions - a film of rare charm, an idea of sheer brilliance

And no doubt lots of others. With a bit of help from Oxford Dictionaries Online and Swan's Practical English Usage.

And then there are some oddities, some work best one way, some another:

'He's a ship's captain', but 'He's but a plane's captain' ???
'Start the car's engine' , but 'Shut the car's door ' ???

As you correctly say, there is no 'was' in subjunctive past.

The real question though, is whether it is necessary to use a separate subjunctive form after 'if' for unreal conditionals for what amounts to two persons of one verb, when for all other persons of 'be' and for every other verb, no such separate form exists, and we use what the same form as the simple past.

And most modern (i.e. non-prescriptive) grammars would say no - it's a matter of style. You are quite entitled to think 'were' sounds more elegant, and perhaps more appropriate in more formal language, but that doesn't mean 'was' is incorrect.

In teaching English as a foreign language we refer to this use of past simple in present time hypothetical conditionals as the 'unreal past' rather than subjunctive, and see 'were' as an optional exception, but warn students that it is needed in more formal language. But most of the time we use informal language, and 'was' is just fine.

This is from the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, where they call Unreal past Irrealis:

'This use of were is highly exceptional: there is no other verb in the language where the modal remoteness meaning is expressed by a different inflectional form from the past meaning. The irrealis mood form is unique to be, and limited to the 1st and 3rd person singular. It is an untidy relic of an earlier system, and some speakers usually, if not always, use preterite was instead.'

Another example is the expression 'if it wasn't /weren't for', where the use of 'was' is probably even more common, and after 'I wish I was/were' (same 'rule'). At Ngram they're running neck-and-neck.

http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=I+wish+I+was%2CI+wish+I+were&year_start=1800&year_end=2008&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2CI%20wish%20I%20was%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2CI%20wish%20I%20were%3B%2Cc0

The subjunctive has slowly been disappearing from English over the centuries, and present subjunctive, for example, is hardly used nowadays in British English. Yet in the eighteenth century it was still deemed incorrect not to use subjunctive in present time real conditionals, something nobody would do today:

'If music be the food of love' - Shakespeare
'we found therein several massy pieces of yellow metal, which, if they be real gold, must be of immense value.' - Gulliver's Travels - Jonathan Swift
'If there be in this work, as some have been pleased to say, a stronger picture of ...', Tom Jones, Henry Fielding

By the nineteenth century it had more or less died out, but we can still find it occasionally in Jane Austen - 'and if her home be uncomfortable, or her fortune small'. Nowadays we'd think of that as rather archaic. Language changes. Use of subjunctive 'were' might show you're 'educated', but that's about all.

But perhaps the real answer to "there is no possibility of using 'was' in the past tense with an 'if' statement" is that of course there is, simply because there are enough competent speakers who do exactly tha to make it standard. But then that's a descriptivist talking.

@jayles - I don't really know why you consider "a sense of pride" and "a feeling of despair" hard to explain or fossilised expressions - to me 'of' is absolutely natural here, and I can't see any other way we might have said them . Apart from the genitive aspect, 'of ' is amost a dependent preposition for both nouns. At Netspeak, 44.8% of instances of 'sense' are followed by 'of', with 17.8 % for 'feeling', (this includes non-noun use). And it's the same story at Just The Word (from The British National Corpus).

Other European languages seem to deal with them in a similar way (or use a genitive inflection). French of course using 'de', where we got the 'of' construction from in the first place:

a sense of pride :
un sentiment de fierté - of
un sentido de orgullo- of
ein Gefühl von Stolz - of
poczucie dumy (Polish) - dumy is the genitive of duma
sensus superbiae (Latin) - genitive of superbia

a feeling of despair:
un sentiment de désespoir - of
un sentimiento de desesperación - of
ein Gefühl der Verzweiflung - genitive of die
uczucie rozpaczy (Polish) - genitive of rozpacz

We have lots of expressions like this with verbs of feeling and thinking: 'sense of' reminds me, of course, of sense nouns - 'a taste of', 'the smell of', 'the very sight of', etc

But then there are things like:

' an intimation of danger'
' the awareness of his presence'
' their perception of themselves'
' the consciousness of self and related issues'
' the sheer pleasure of learning'

and in books etc:

'The Joy of Sex'
'Fear of Flying'
'The Call of the Wild'

None of these would work with genitive 's' or a possessive pronoun, but work perfectly with 'of'. It looks as though, when we took 'de' from French, we took on a lot more than possession and partitives. I wouldn't be at all surprised if this genitive idea of using gentive for feelings and verbs of consciousness went back to the beginnings of language.

I'm (now, after a bit of googling) aware that the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language lists some expressions with 'of' as being fossilised or idiomatic - 'by dint of', 'in view of', 'in spite of', 'by way of' etc, but these seem to me to be one offs, whereas the rule for verbs of feeling and thinking is so general that I wouldn't consider them in the same vein.

Also, as I understand it, fossilised expressions are relatively fixed. But we can change these quite a lot:

a feeling of despair, hope, despondency etc (the following noun can be varied quite considerably)
feelings of ... (we can have a change in number)
a feeling of outright desparation (we can modify the noun with an adjective)
a feeling of despondency, not to mention of despair (coordination of nouns is possible)
this feeling of dispair (a change of determiner is possible)
I have a nasty feeling (the preposition can be ommited)

You can't do this with the expressions they list as fossilised at CaGEL (p616 - it's easy enough to find on the web). :)

It simply comes from the colour strips or kits (AmE - uniforms) they wear. Here in Poland the national team is known as the Biało-Czerwoni (the White-Reds), the colours of the national flag and of their strips.

It seems that British football team nicknames do sometimes take 'the'. Fulham are blessed with the name 'the cottagers', for example. Several teams, for example Newcastle United, are called the Magpies, from their black and white strips, others are called the Robins, from their red strips, and a couple are known as the Tigers, from their striped kits.

Norwich City, on the other hand, seems to have changed the colour of their strip, from blue and white to yellow, to match their nickname 'The Canaries'.

As I ended up by saying, I think it's probably more about culture and tradition than linguistics, and you'd probably need to go back to the early history of American football, basketball and baseball to find the answer. It might just have been one college team that started the trend.

There seem to have been quite a lot of teams with plural nouns used with 'the' in the early days of American football. In Wikipedia there is a reference to the Virginia Cavaliers from 1887, the Georgia Bulldogs 1892, the Oklahoma Sooners 1895. And perhaps the habit simply spread to teams in general. Personally, I'd to look to history for your answer rather than to grammar.

Incidentally, sox singular? - They were originally the Boston Red Stockings. :)

American team names often include plural nouns, which would seem to lend themselves to the use of the definite article - The Yankees, for example. Animal names seem to be particularly common, and no doubt fans leave out the city name and simply refer to - The Bears, The Lions, The Colts, The Panthers, etc.

When British football teams have a second name, they are often things like City, United, which don't seem to take 'the' so naturally, and even when there is a plural descriptive noun, we don't tend to use 'the' - Bolton Wanderers, Glasgow Rangers, Doncaster Rovers.

There are a a couple of 'the's in rugby, though - The British Lions, the All Blacks (NZ). But these tend not to include a place name. I thought of the Harlequins (London), but on their website they refere to a match - Harlequins vs Exeter Chiefs, both lacking 'the'. On an animal note, the Leicester rugby union team refer to themselves as 'Leicester Tigers', and don't appear to use 'the', even when the city name is dropped. This is from the local newspaper - "Yet Tigers continue to get the job done, albeit in a scrappy way of late."

So it looks as though it's probably more down to culture and tradition than any linguistic reason.

@jayles - Southerners could also get quite uppity - 1215, 1481, 1830.

OK, 1936 was pretty easy to get, but I had to look quite hard for the other two. And the common thread? Taxes (and especially war taxes), it would appear. Cheshire seems to have been particularly fractious - 1387, 1394, 1400, 1403, 1416.

@hank faenrich - 'worse', 'shameful'? What specifically is bad or shameful about it? That an idiom that was apparently fine in Northern dialect is now gaining ground in that other dialect known as Standard British English? Which is simply educated Southern English, the dialect that got lucky, no better or worse than any other, linguistically. And notice that this use is general in the North, among educated people as well as among those who use stronger urban dialects such as Scouse or Geordie.

Incidentally 'sat' was sometimes used like this in the past in Standard English, but usually with 'down', and to describe the act of sitting down, rather than the state of being sitting down, in other words 'we are sat down' = modern 'we have sat down', and 'they were sat down' = modern 'they had sat down', but as we discussed elsewhere on this forum: 'same difference'. And for the life of me I can't see any sense of someone sitting these people down:

"Now we are sat down and are at ease, I shall tell you a little more of Trout-fishing"
Izaak Walton, The Compleat Angler, 1653

"Timandra, and myself, as we were sat
In her apartment grieving for your fate"
Thomas Otway - Alcibiades 1675

"The company were the farmer and his wife, three children and an old grandmother : when they were sat down, the farmer placed me at some distance from him on the table"
Jonathan Swift - Gulliver’s Travels 1726

"then facing about, he marched up abreast with her to the sofa, and in three plain words, — though not before he was sat down, — nor after he was sat down, — but as he was sitting down — told her, 'he was in love;' "
Lawrence Sterne - The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman 1759

Note the 'as he was sitting down' - no trace of passive here.

(of Pontius Pilate) "When he was sat down on the judgment-seat, his wife sent unto him, saying, 'Have thou nothing to do with that just man' "
The Book of Common Prayer 1799

And I don't suppose anyone sat him, either.

Some thirty years ago or so, the BBC, in particular, opened up more to regional accents, and now I hope the same thing is happening with dialects, an important and defining feature of British English. It's not really surprising that as we hear more, for example, Northerners using elements of their dialect on TV and radio, that some expressions will take hold, just as exposure to American culture means that the same happens with some American expressions that I don't particularly care for, such as 'I'm good' or the complete absence of any awe in the modern use of 'awesome'. But is that 'shameful'? Of course not. It's just how language works.

Fortunately, English belongs to its speakers, and I for one, rather like this idiom and welcome its spread to areas outwith its original homeland (to use a word from another of the British family of Englishes whose spread I'd welcome).

Googling 'he was sat', I was surprised and flattered that my blog post on the subject comes in at Number Two, second only to PITE, of course.

http://random-idea-english.blogspot.com/2013/11/random-thoughts-he-was-sat-she-was-stood.html