The Unreal Past: When the Past Tense is Not About the Past

Pete

01 Feb 2024

Book lesson

This article is going to possibly BLOW YOUR MIND about how to understand the past tense in English.

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Here’s the long and short of it: THE PAST TENSE IS NOT ABOUT THE PAST.

Before you go to textbooks and look for proof to disagree with me, let me just clarify one thing. Yes, we often use the past tense to talk about things that happened. For example:

I love her. (= I still love her, constantly every day!)

I loved her. (= I used to love her, but not anymore.)

In a way, you can think of the past tense as whether that thing you are describing is true or not IN THE PRESENT:

I love her. (= the love is still true.)

I loved her. (= the love is no longer true.)

This is very important, extremely important when it comes to hypotheticals (= Let’s pretend, let’s say…) and conditionals (= IF…). When you want to describe something that is not real, that you are only imagining it, only playing it out in your mind, you use the past tense to show that that thing is actually not real:

This room is painted blue. (= It is true: the room is blue!)

Let’s say the room was painted red. (= It is, in fact, not red! I’m only imagining.)

Now let’s try type 2 conditionals:

If I were a king, I would cut your head off first. (= I am, in fact, not a king, nor would I really become one in the near or distant future.)

Notice how you use the present tense if becoming king is going to happen one day:

When I am king, I will cut your head off first. (= I am king soon! Just you wait!)

All in all, you begin to realise that the past tense verbs in “If I were a king” and “Let’s say the room was painted red” is not referring to the past at all. Nor the present. It is rather an improbable future.

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Yes: the past tense can be used to talk about the future.

And now I have confused you even more.

One last thing I will leave you with HOPE and WISH. HOPE is for cases that are more likely to happen (and therefore uses the present tense), and WISH is for unlikely events (and uses the past). Let’s go back to that love story we had in the beginning: