What I like about "lest" is that it demonstrates that the present subjunctive as a grammatical category is not quite dead yet in English. A native speaker of En

What I like about "lest" is that it demonstrates that the present subjunctive as a grammatical category is not quite dead yet in English. A native speaker of English knows that "lest it seem" is right and "lest it seems" is wrong, generally without ever having been taught this or knowing what to call this distinction. The so-called past subjunctive is more easily found, though it's losing its distinctive form (there's only one). People say "if I was" instead of "if I am" when they're describing a present contrary-to-fact state -- "If I was rich, I'd buy a Tesla". You can see that this is a past subjunctive, not a simple past, because it isn't past at all but present and contrary to fact. So English still retains the subjunctive! Yay!