![]() 'We were both sitting at the bar, and there was an incredibly drunk person sitting between us.' 'Continuous', from the verb 'to continue', which means 'to carry on', or 'don't stop', or 'keep going'. Future simple? A point in time after now. So maybe, just maybe, the name 'simple' shows us that 'this is the straightforward one'. So why would someone decide to refer to a tense / aspect combination as 'the present 'easy', or 'the past 'not complicated'? Well, as you could probably figure out from the introduction to this article, time is quite a complex idea, full of paradoxes and the speed of light and other stuff that you'd need to grow a big beard and wear black-rimmed glasses in order to understand. 'Simple' means 'easy', or 'basic', or 'not complicated', as in 'a simple question'. Let's focus on the meaning of those words, in the same way that 'Katya' means 'pure' (or 'torture', depending on how you translate it!) Forget about the grammatical implications. Now, let's look at those words – simple, continuous and perfect. Mix these aspects with the tenses, and what you end up with is the English tense system. ![]() There are three aspects in the English language – the simple, the continuous and the perfect. Of course, the way I 'view' a particular time may be very different from the way someone else looks at it. So, if tense is time, there are only three. There are only three answers to this question – to the past, to the future or.I wouldn't go anywhere. Let's say, for the sake of the argument, that tense means time.īack to the time machine.When would you go? Some may even pull out a calculator.Įventually, the answers start coming. Some students will frown and start counting under their breath with a look of intense concentration on their faces. Walk into any classroom, and ask the students there how many tenses there are in the English language, and the result will always be the same. The meaning of the name is either means 'pure' or 'torture', both from Greek, depending on how you translate it.Īs for the drunk guy, he was carried away by a kind-hearted healthcare auxiliary who gave him a strong coffee and a complete change of blood. Fortunately for me, the drunk guy didn't stand a chance. By the time I found myself sitting at the bar.those odds were at two to one. But, over the years, we gradually moved closer.I moved from England to Malta, where my wife was born, reducing those odds to 401880 to one. The odds of my wife and I ever meeting were, therefore, a staggering 05288144222 to one. On the eleventh of November, 1990, there were, apparently, 05288144222 people in the world. The fact that we ever met each other at all is amazing. Today, we've been married for ten years, and we have what I like to think of as a perfect marriage. I smiled too, and the rest, as they say, is history. We both watched him collapse, and then looked up at each other, smiling in the slightly superior way that sober people do when watching drunken antics. ![]() At one point, this person leapt off his barstool, screamed"I'm wanna rock n’ roll all night!".and promptly fell over. We were both sitting at the bar, and there was an incredibly drunk person sitting between us. It was November the eleventh, 1990, at a Halloween disco party. I would go back to the night that I first met my wife. The obvious question is.where, or rather.when, would you go? In fact, it's rather commonplace, and our scientist is now trying to figure out a way to land on the sun without instantly turning into a pile of ash with black-rimmed glasses and a big beard.but that's another story, and one that doesn't concern us. And he succeeds, and builds a time machine out of old cereal boxes, a couple of toilet roll tubes and lots of sticky tape and staples. ![]() Now, the only thing faster than the speed of light is the speed of dark (because no matter how fast light travels, darkness is always there first), so our scientist turns off all the lights and gets to work. Let's imagine that his next thought is 'Golly gee! If I could travel faster than the speed of light, then I could travel to the sun and I would actually get there eight minutes ago!" So he runs off to find a way to travel faster than light. Let's imagine that, at some point in time, a very clever scientist in a long white coat, black-rimmed glasses and a huge scientific-looking beard happens to be looking up at the sun and thinking "wow! I'm looking at the sun now, but the sun is so far away that its light takes eight minutes to reach my eyes, which means that I'm actually seeing the sun as it was eight minutes ago.". Let's imagine, just for a moment, that time travel was possible.
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