File it in the basement
Oh really.
The source is Private Eye News, she says in a followup tweet.
The Guardian kept it secret. So interesting.
Tip Jar
Oh really.
The source is Private Eye News, she says in a followup tweet.
The Guardian kept it secret. So interesting.
What is the current rage for putting has or had in front of words that don’t need it? Sorry to go off topic, but it irritates me immensely.
Well, at least it has tried… :D
Current rage? I don’t think so. Often they do need it: there’s a difference in meaning. Turner says OJ has relentlessly persecuted women – meaning, over time. If she’d said OJ persecuted women it would sound like a single event firmly in the past. The “has” in “the investigator has found him guilty” is perhaps not as necessary but it’s a very standard way of narrating. Writing is a matter of music, of rhythm, of what is or isn’t pleasing to read. I don’t see anything wrong with that “has found.”
The ‘has’ denotes something which has happened in the immediate past: ‘The prison has released the innocent man’. It is often used on rolling news pages where updates are being typed out almost as the events happen.
Without ‘has’, the past tense could mean any time in the past (unless a date is appended): ‘The prison released the innocent man on Tuesday’.
It is common usage in Britain, I don’t know about the US.
And what Ophelia said while I was typing.
It’s very common usage here too; abs’ly standard.
In any event, bullying women is a typical behavior of inferior males.
Ophelia and Tigger, I think you responded to the wrong ‘has’. “Owen Jones has relentlessly persecuted women…” makes sense, but “An external investigator … has found him guilty” much less so. The ‘has’ in that sentence is surplus.
I responded to both. The “has” is surplus in the sense that it’s not required, but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be there. As I said, it’s a completely standard usage, i.e. there’s nothing wrong with it.
Writing well is not a matter of using the fewest words possible, nor is it a matter of using the simplest shortest words possible. It’s standard news narrative style to say “has found/said” etc. instead of just found/said. I’m sure there’s a word for the tense but I don’t know what it is. Past progressive?
Present perfect, that’s what it’s called. Indicates ongoingness.
How to use the present perfect:
I think in journalism the “has” is the last one – action completed recently. The court has found: that means nowish, not a year ago.
Though in fact you could use it for more distant events – “Courts have repeatedly found that” etc etc. The “have” is quite necessary there.
It depends one’s stylistic preferences. If precision and economy of words matter to you, then three simple past will be preferred in most cases. I just finished a novel that overused the perfect tenses, so I can sympathize with the irritated sentiment.
It partly depends on that, but not entirely. There are different shades of meaning between the two, which I don’t know exactly how to describe, because I’m a native speaker so using both is intuitive more than deliberate. One difference relative to journalism has occurred to me though, which is that saying “A court found X guilty” would need a today or yesterday or last week, while a has found doesn’t. The first would have to be updated and the second wouldn’t. It may be that journalists prefer “has found” because it implies recently but doesn’t require specificity or updating.
It certainly is funny how native speakers often have the hardest time explaining their languages. I know I only really began to understand English through the lens of learning Russian. (and Japanese.) (and Irish.) French was no help in the matter. I’ve always suspected syntactic similarity to be the reason for that. French and Spanish sentences just map too easily onto their English counterparts to force an “O captain, my captain” kind of perspective shift.
But …
“Twenty years ago, Baddy McBadguy terrorized the city of Townsville. The police eventually apprehended him, and he stood trial almost immediately. The court found him guilty of seventeen counts of taking candy from babies.”
News media have the worst writers. Precious few would have earned passing marks in my seventh grade English class. Their inability to employ the proper tense and mood is a peeve I’ve been nursing since elementary school. “If he catches that pass, he runs it in for a TD.” Lawdy!
I don’t understand this.
‘If he catches that pass, he runs it in for a TD’. Well, I have no idea what a TD is, but that is perfectly good colloquial English, and (apart from that ‘TD’, in my case – I am supposing it is some kind of try, as in rugby, or goal, as in soccer) it is perfectly comprehensible. I wonder sometimes whether people who complain about grammar ever listen to how people actually speak, as good novelists and story-writers do – including Japanese writers (since Japanese gets mentioned): I have been translating some short stories by Shiga Naoya who has a wonderful ear for colloquial speech; and having spent quite a bit of my youth doing working-class jobs, I have no objection to working-class speech or to dialects. And, I am sorry, but that ‘external investigator… has found him guilty’ makes perfect sense to me: this is something that has happened in Owen Jones’s yet unfinished professional life, and some specific date in the past is not mentioned. It is used to suggest that OJ’s bullying is habitual and probably ongoing. I might add that I have written for a number of literary journals, including PN Review & the Times Literary Supplement in Britain, and the Chicago Review in the USA, and have ever had any editor correcting my grammar.
“I might add that I have written for a number of literary journals, including PN Review & the Times Literary Supplement in Britain, and the Chicago Review in the USA, and have ever had any editor correcting my grammar.”
But I will correct it. For the last clause you should say:-
“and have NEVER had any editor correcting my grammar.”
Now I know that’s just a typo but there is a rule that any paragraph about grammar/spelling mistakes will have a 75% chance of containing grammar/spelling mistakes.
There’s a vast gulf between having a typo corrected and having one’s grammar corrected though. VAST.
I very much like how these threads drift on to points of grammar and language.
I was taught formal grammar in my first year at high school, but they dropped it a year or two after that. We were taught some rubbish called “sociolinguistics” instead. I had loved parsing sentences into gerunds, present participles and the like. Fortunately I was learning Latin, which is grammatical par excellence, and with its inflections and cases, wildly different from English.
When I came to teach Medieval English literature to students a year or two younger than me, they were hampered by not knowing what a noun or a verb was.