An Australian man wins a trip to Boston. His mates have been telling him how good the seafood is in Boston, and he can’t wait to hit some restaurants. He arrives and, after freshening up at the hotel, wanders out to catch a taxi and hopefully be directed to a decent seafood place. Unbeknownst to him, his cabdriver is a post-grad student going for his doctorate in linguistics and grammatical syntax. The Aussie says, “Hey, mate, where can I get scrod?”

The cabdriver turns to him with a look of intellectual curiosity and replies, “Sir, I have heard it asked for in many ways, shapes and forms, but I’ve never heard it in the pluperfect subjunctive before.”

That’s ace!

Lest you think that this is all just fun and games over here at BloodyWellWrite.com, here’s some info on what the heck pluperfect is:

The pluperfect tense is a perfect tense that exists in most Indo-European languages; it is used to refer to an event that has been completed before another past action.

Take a look at this: “The blind man, who knew that he had risen, motioned him to sit down again.” He had risen is an example of the pluperfect tense.* It refers to an event (someone rises from his seat), which takes place before another event (the blind man notices the fact that the other has risen). Because that second event is a past event and the past tense is used to refer to it (the blind man knew), the pluperfect tense is needed to make it obvious that the first event has taken place even earlier in the past.

Bloody oath!

Does anyone else have a hankering for a coldie?

Happy trails!

SAK

*From Charles Dickens’ “Barnaby Rudge: a Tale of the Riots of ’Eighty.”