Careful What You Ask For

And now for a little bit of (esoteric) levity:

An Australian man wins a trip to Boston. His mates have been telling him how good the seafood is in Boston, and he can't wait to hit some restaurants. He arrives, and, after freshening up at the hotel, wanders out to catch a taxi and hopefully be directed to a good seafood place. Unbeknownst to him, his cabbie is a post-grad student going for his doctorate in linguistics and grammatical syntax. Our guy says, "Hey, mate, where can I get scrod?"

The cabdriver turns to him with a look of intellectual curiosity and replies, "Sir, I have heard it asked for in many ways, shapes, and forms, but never once have I heard it asked for in the pluperfect subjunctive."