Please Don't Ruin A Perfectly Good Tense! - The Grammar-Us Blog - Grammar-Us

When it comes to conjugating verbs, I find it tremendously ironic that the two tenses with “perfect” in their names are the two that are frequently used far from perfectly! These are the present perfect and the past perfect tenses. Here are some examples:

PRESENT PERFECT TENSE: I have ridden the bus to work for years. (The present perfect tense uses the word “have,” together with a verb, to indicate an action that happened at an unspecified time before now.)

PAST PERFECT TENSE: I had hoped to be finished with my chores before my favorite television show aired. (The past perfect tense uses the word “had,” together with a verb, to indicate an action that happened before a specific time in the past.)

The verb that must be paired with either “have” or “had” in order to form the present or past perfect tense must always be in the past tense. When the paired verb is a regular verb (which means that the simple addition of “e-d” to the end of the word changes it to past tense), this is not usually a problem. The second example sentence above shows a regular verb in the past perfect tense (“had hoped”). But when the verb is irregular (no “e-d” is added, and the spelling of the verb is actually changed in order to make it past tense), this is where the problems occur, because irregular verbs have special past-tense spellings that are only used in the perfect tenses. The first example sentence above shows one of these irregular verbs(“had ridden”).

Here are some examples of irregular present and past tense verbs:

PRESENT TENSE/PAST TENSE/PRESENT or PAST PERFECT TENSE

Drink/Drank/Drunk
Shrink/Shrank/Shrunk
Stink/Stank/Stunk
Prove/Proved/Proven
Ride/Rode/Ridden
Hide/Hid/Hidden
Speak/Spoke/Spoken
Eat/Ate/Eaten
Break/Broke/Broken
See/Saw/Seen
Forget/Forgot/Forgotten

Now that you know the difference, next time you watch “Honey, I Shrunk The Kids,” I hope you will join me in cringing at the grammatical error in the title.