subjunctive

"If this were" is an example of the subjunctive mood in English.

For example, good writers may not know what the subjunctive mood is, but they know how and when to use it.

Its a possibility and a wish of theirs, so it should be expressed in the subjunctive.

I remember in primary school they teach the past of the subjunctive with "if" before all the pronouns.

But this should not use the subjunctive, because he has indeed drawn an image using the scale of the Moon being one pixel wide.

In latin languages, when a sentence starts with "if" and the verb is in a past tense form, it must be the subjunctive form of the past tense.

This shows it's possible, and hence the subjunctive is inappropriate.

Use of the subjunctive mood is slowly declining, especially in the UK. We often smooth out the difference by inserting a "should" or "might".

> ps: There's a lack of a good verb tense for something that could happen but it is unlikely, there's no good pessimistic subjunctive future.

"We do something similar with phrasing like "if you would like" or in German using subjunctive forms of many verbs like "I would like" / "Ich möchte" / "quisiera" instead of "I want" / "Ich mag" / "quiero".

So in that sense, you can call any form you want "subjunctive", as long as you're willing to extend the description to every instance of an analogous form, which is easy with "if I were a rich man", as it is the only form of its kind.- However, as the generally-agreed subjunctive is a living and useful phenomenon, and is unrelated to the were-form, it might be nice to give the were-form a name that won't confuse people.