Monday 20 December 2010
Giles Coren
Giles Coren achieved notoriety with his tantrum in the form of a letter to the sub-editors at the Times. Despite his apparent belief in his superiority in matters of editing, I would argue, on the evidence of his latest column, republished in the Australian today, that he doesn't know his sequence of tenses. In the bracketed comment about Time magazine in this excerpt, surely 'as if it had been stepped on' should be 'as if it has been stepped on'. But perhaps it's not his fault - at least not directly; perhaps it's the revenge of the subs:
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Interesting. For some reason my first instinct would be to use 'had', but I think that you may be right and that 'has' is technically more correct. A Romanian colleague recently questioned my use of tenses as being 'not what we learned at school'. I wish I'd been taught them at school.
ReplyDeleteTheir history classes might have been less appealing.
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