Why Words are the Source of Misunderstandings

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, in his delightful tale of The Little Prince, makes an observation that is as true in grammar as in anything else: words are the source of misunderstandings. 

Students of English often find tenses difficult and confusing. The English way of looking at time and aspect differs from what they're used to in their first language. And English grammatical jargon is misleading - words suddenly differ from their usual meaning.

Add to their confusion the tons of well-meant nonsense you can find on the internet. Grammar should help, not hinder, so let's try and make some sense of time and tense.

It should be easy enough because the names of tenses read like a list of ingredients. Unfortunately, the grammatical terms in the verb form recipe often have a different meaning in everyday English. Present Perfect is a good example: it doesn't happen now, nor is it about anything excellent. 

The terminology in coursebooks is a given. Teachers often follow the books. But how can we explain anything clearly, if we use ambiguous words? 

We expect orange juice to come from oranges, not apples - tomato sauce from tomatoes, not potatoes. Why then is a perfect form made with a past participle? If logic had anything to do with it, we'd call it the perfect participle.

And why is a Perfect tense called perfect in the first place? The jargon isn't self-explanatory because the word perfect has a different meaning in real life. Coursebooks never mention where the term came from - Latin.

 Latin used to be the international language of learning in Europe. Grammarians adopted the terminology of Latin grammar and squeezed other languages into the same mould. That's all. 

Another example: the fake grammar term *present perfect simple. There's no such thing. It's nonsense jargon, yet popular on the internet. Worse still, it has somehow wormed its way into teacher training methods.

Just google for English tenses and find that standard matrix showing 12 combinations of time and aspect. You know the one I mean: past, present and future on one axis; simple, continuous, perfect and perfect continuous on the other. Please notice that *Present Perfect Simple is not among the options. It's fake terminology.

The Simple forms don't combine with any other aspect. It's as simple as that, and here's why. Picture a bowl of pasta. Without any other ingredients, cooked pasta is simple - just pasta. 

If you add tomato sauce, fresh basil or grated Parmesan cheese, the pasta dish becomes more complex in flavour. Whenever you add ingredients like Perfect or Continuous to a verb form recipe, the construct becomes more complex and stops being Simple. 

So the opposite of simple is complex. The opposite of continuous, should you ever need the term, is non-continuous. Let's keep out the fake jargon, shall we?

Some terminology does matter, though. Imagine trying to understand or talk about football if you don't know the meaning of foot or ball. You want those words to make sense, of course. Then why should we try and discuss tenses without explaining what Present or Perfect really means?

Explain what's essential. Leave out the rest - especially fake jargon. Grammar and its terminology should help, not hinder.

Like, comment and share if you enjoyed reading this post