medad is still correct, but the subjunctive in English is dying. However, "if I were you, I would..." is one of the last holdouts. But I hear more and more native speakers saying, "if I was you"; that isn �t standard yet, but the language (especially American English) is moving toward "if I was you." I don �t teach the subjunctive at all at my level, but if I did (subjunctive), I would teach "if I were" and point out that some native speakers say "if I was."

Good try, Lynne. Randolph Quirk is one of my favourite linguists. The grammar that Les quotes is considered (Wikipedia) to be "the first grammar of English in real use rather than one based on rules handed down by teachers and scholars" (that is, �descriptive �, as opposed to the zombie rules many of our colleagues insist on). As the good Lord Quirk has often indicated, language study moves with the times and the criteria can change accordingly as research methods improve.  The most recent exhaustive, descriptive grammar of the English language, Huddleston and Pullum �s The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language does make a point of saying that there is a problem with referring to the past of the subjunctive. At the risk of being tedious, can I just re-repost Geoff Pullum �s blog piece on this subject:

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4042