Dear Geist,

Which of these three sentences, if any, are grammatically okay?

(1) I would have loved to go.
(2) I would love to have gone.
(3) I would have loved to have gone.

I teach copy editing, but I avoid these because I have the terrible sense of being wrong about them when I try to parse them for my students.

—Chickening Out, Dauphin MB

Dear Chickening,

Stronger humans than you have slunk offstage when asked to illuminate this family of sentences. But readers and speakers need them, so on we go. Our advice is not to delve too far into the technical grammar, but to point your students to the plain meanings of the verbs.

(1) “I would have loved to go” says that if some other circumstance had been in place—an invitation, say, or more free time—the speaker would have loved to go—back then.

(2) “I would love to have gone” says that the speaker would love—right now, in the present moment—to have gone, perhaps in order to have the memory of it now, or to have attended an event that turned out to be historic or memorable in some other way.

(3) “I would have loved to have gone with you” is a brave, well-meant roundup of conditions and times that criss-cross and go nowhere: the speaker would have loved to go with the other, but not until the events had passed—maybe. In conversation, most English speakers would get the gist. But as a copy-editing teacher, you'll want to point out that this one is overwrought, and requires a generous reader more than a painstaking study of its parts.

Still, it’s downright life-affirming that people who speak and write are so ready to leap in and put together or decode a sentence, “correct” or not, that conveys what they want to say.

—The Editors