For Sharing Knowledge
“What horror does,” Braudy said, “is keep our mortality squarely in front of us.”
Popular culture, he argued, essentially allows us to indulge our fears and desires without penalty, and that explains the pleasure we currently derive from watching films or TV shows featuring monsters, including zombies and vampires.
The above excerpt is from the article "Monsters on our minds: What our fascination with frightful creatures says about us" by Susan Bell. It tries to explain how our fascination with "frightful creatures" works.
The verb form that we use most often for describing what something is like or how something works is the one with that S we need to remember.
It’s the simple present. Or SSSimple PreSSSent. The name isn't important. It looks like this:
A dog barks. A cat does not.
A gear turns. A beam supports. A roof protects.
There are a gazillion decent websites that explain English verb tenses. My favourite is this one. It has simple explanations for all the tenses. It also has practice exercises that might help.
We can also look here for a quick reminder of this and other times where we might forget that frightening S.
If you know French well, remember this. If you would say en train de for your verb in French, use ing in English, not that simple present S.
Guylaine est en train d’éplucher les patates pour son pâté chinois de 2000 livres. Elle souhaite battre le record mondial.
Guylaine peels is peelING potatoes for her 2000 pound shepherd’s pie. She’s hopING to break the world record.
So before going to bed at night, remember to check for monsters under your bed or in the closet. Or a missing s in your texts...
For Telling a Story
Once upon a time there was a rich hat maker. He told lots of lies. But he was so rich that nobody cared when he told lies.
“Oh, he’s just joking!” they all laughed.
The rich hat maker loved to go to dances with other rich people. At the dances, the rich people stood around and told lies to each other.
The excerpt above is from the fairytale "Rumpelstiltskin" on the website The Fable Cottage. Almost all the verbs are in the form that is used most in English for telling a story, whether it's a fairytale or what we did on the weekend.
It's the ed verb tense, known as the simple past. Check this web page for its basic form and some links to exercises.
If you noticed that a lot of the verbs in the excerpt above don't end with ed, you're right. Here they are:
Once upon a time there was a rich hat maker. He told lots of lies. But he was so rich that nobody cared when he told lies.
“Oh, he’s just joking!” they all laughed.
The rich hat maker loved to go to dances with other rich people. At the dances, the rich people stood around and told lies to each other.
They're still in the same verb tense but they're part of that long list of exceptions that don't take ed in the simple past. Here's a list of "I never take an ed" verbs.
If you're someone who sometimes forgets to put the ed, check this page for an explanation about why that might be happening to you.
Two other verb tenses that help us keep things clear when we tell stories are the past progressive and the past perfect. They clarify what what was happening when or what happened before something else happened.