Number 16
This issue is a day early because I'll be out of town, and I want to be sure there's time to re-send it if the transmission goes funny again.
A friend of mine, originally from Poland, is an appeals lawyer. Her English is excellent, often better than that of those she works with in court, including some of the judges, but occasionally she asks me a question about English. In reviewing the case notes for an appeal for a man in jail who was accused of stalking a woman, she found that the prosecuting lawyer asked this in court: "And then what would he do?" My friend wanted to verify her sense that "would" used this way suggests habitual or repeated action.
She is right. While "would" can be used in several different ways, in no case does it indicate the simple past, i.e. a statement of a discrete, completed action. Compare:
Questions are a little different, but clearly, "What would he do then?" is not the same as "What did he do then?"
If the prosecutor did not state as a fact that the accused did certain things on more than one occasion, but implied it in the question without facts to back it up, he was cleverly creating an assumption in the minds of the judge and jury by the way he phrased the question. No one, not the judge nor the defendant's lawyer, objected to this during the trial.
You don't have to know the names of tenses or grammatical moods to understand that it is easy to imply something that may or may not be true by this simple use of "would," and in this case it sped right by the judge, though not by my sharp-eyed lawyer friend.
This, of course, is the point of the old joke, "When did you stop beating your wife?" It's a legal joke. Is the man innocent or guilty of beating his wife? He is already assumed to be guilty. It's a setup.
"Teen dies this afternoon." A psychic prediction? Blow-by-blow, you-are-there, real-time grisly news coverage? No. It's an advance announcement of a TV news report to come. The teen had already died earlier in the day. He was already dead. Past tense. Few things are more past tense than death.
I first started noticing the present tense in journalism many years ago in a newspaper feature, a slice-of-life story. It irritated me then and irritates me more now. Then, I saw that the writer was attempting a "literary" style, one that didn't work for me. Now, the present tense is ubiquitous in TV and print news reporting. Even TV documentaries about history create ghostly present-tense images, such as when "the Union battalion advances on the already exhausted Confederate troops."
The function of this use of the present tense when describing past actions may be to suggest that the audience is right there. Print newspaper and magazine writers may be trying to assume the immediacy of their great rival, television; TV reporting may be trying to pass the speed of light. Accuracy should come first, and reporting the past as present is inaccurate. Writers and speakers get tangled in shifting tenses, too, trying to juggle a mix of times ("Lincoln delivers the speech that will be known as the Gettysburg Address, which he wrote on the train", or "On a train, Lincoln writes a speech that is known as the Gettysburg Address" ~ any number of awkward combinations is possible).
Usually I don't like this device even in fiction. Sharyn McCrumb, one of my favorite mystery writers (this is day for plugs ~ see below), commented on it in a funny short story about a writers' conference (I think it was "Happiness Is a Dead Poet"). A disgruntled writer thought to herself that she could acquire a much higher literary reputation if she just wrote her popular fiction in the present tense. Try it ~ take any given piece of narrative writing, mentally change all the tenses to the present, and see if it doesn't sound more high-toned. It's a spurious way to assume a virtue, though you have it not, i.e. mood, literary sensibility, talent. Some writers of fiction may feel the present tense suggests a timeless quality, but think what it really implies. I'll make up an example:
"Samantha slouches slowly through the living room at twilight and rearranges the irises in the vase as she rubs her aching, flaking lips together to try to slough off the cells Rupert's kisses leave on her mouth."
Does Samantha do this habitually? Is this a metaphor for her customary emotional and mental state? I think Samantha could get over Rupert faster in the simple past tense. And I don't think I'll be writing any romance novels.
We're lucky to have verb tenses in English, unlike, say, Chinese. Here's a little Chinese grammar from www.chinese-outpost.com/language/grammar/gram0010.asp:
"...let's pretend for a moment that English verbs have only one form each, with no inflections or aspects or tenses whatsoever.
"For example, say we have the verb 'go' but no such thing as went, gone, am going, will go, and etc. [sic] Nothing but 'go'.
I go Beijing.
She go Beijing.
We go Beijing.
"How would we try to express tense and time in English under these circumstances? Probably like this, which is one way Chinese does it:
Tomorrow I go Beijing.
Right now she go Beijing.
Yesterday we go Beijing.
"Adverbs! Instead of inflecting verbs, the Chinese language relies heavily on the use of adverbs to communicate what English and many other languages do with different verb tenses."
Looks like Chinese doesn't have prepositions either.
Tenses ~ use 'em if you got 'em. Especially when reporting the actual past.
A reader referred me to the web site of his sister, Suede (www.suedewave.com), a jazz singer. I was lucky enough to catch her live this weekend. Not only does she have one of the best voices around, she's charming and witty too. You can listen to some great clips on her site, and check her concert schedule.
Copyright Rhonda Keith 2003. Parvum Opus or part of it may be reproduced only with permission, but it is permissible to forward the entire newsletter as long as the copyright remains.
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