An imaginary University teacher in England, about 241 years old, secret admiror of my inspirations, asked where I had got that brilliant explanation for the present perfect from, and although I do never give my sources, I do obviously have to admit that it sprang off my mind like Zeus’s Athena. (It does some good to deal with philosophy: not only abstract questions become easily understandable but you get used to search for reccurence and principle of use.)

She thought that there would be nothing else to be improved in English grammar explanation, but this is rather not true. As an example (and there are others), the quite lacking explanation of the tense ‘will’, usually put into the same jar than all the other possible futures as present tense and continuous.

Behold! Have you ever remarked that there is no will without a preceeding agreement: “I tell you now that I will be there at 10.” “I have signed a contract and it is sure that I will work in Kentucky.” “I have studied medicine and thus, I will take over patients, make diagnosis and other.” The roots of ‘will’ are in the present and depend on given word, were it a university title, as social acknowledgement of something. You’d never say: “I will go to the cinema on Saturday.” (Although English grammar books are full of such odd examples.) You’d say: I’m going to the cinema on Saturday.

As my beloved teacher was studiyng the reasons for the loss of this incredibly interesting and moral tense, here it is: people don’t keep word anymore, and contracts are not respected. Language and social behaviour do go together, hand by hand.

By the way, I discovered the following horrifying sentence in a Cambridge English book: “Do you have a mate for the party yet?” Forgot the difference between yet and already, already, dear?