Know your English
“A one-eyed man or an one-eyed man (C. K. Jacob, Kottayam).”
“It is ‘a one-eyed man.’ ‘One’ is pronounced like ‘won.’ As the rst sound in ‘one’ is ‘w’, we say ‘a one-eyed man’ and not ‘an one-eyed man.’ But the rst sound in ‘only’ is like the ‘o’ in ‘home.’ It is not ‘w.’ Hence ‘an only child.’”
“Notice, observe (S. Vanaja, Salem).” “When you observe something, you look with care.
He observed her movements for about a week.
‘To notice’ is to see rather casually or involuntarily.
I noticed him when he was leaving the hall.”
“The dierent tenses in English and how to use them (A. K. Das, Varanasi).”
“I will discuss one every week. More than that will make readers tense. Let us take the simple present tense rst. It has several uses. First, it is used to express habitual action. Habitual action is action that has become a habit. It is not action that is performed occasionally but done in a routine manner. You get up at 5 O’clock in the morning every day. When you say that you get up at 5 O’ clock, it means that it is your habit to get up at 5 O’clock every day. This is a habitual action.
We go to Kodaikanal every year. He smokes heavily.
She is never alone.
The simple present tense is also used to convey universal truths.
The earth moves round the sun.
The sun sets in the west.
Milk is white.
Dogs bark.
The simple present tense is used to denote a future event that has been xed in advance.
We leave for Calcutta tomorrow.
The Executive Committee meets on 20, March ‘92.
The dierence between ‘He will arrive here tomorrow’ and ‘He arrives here tomorrow’ is that there is absolute certainty about, ‘He arrives here tomorrow.’
The President arrives in Madras next Sunday.
The simple present is also used in conditional and temporal clauses.
I will come if it doesn’t rain.
He won’t do it unless you ask him.
The simple present is used to refer to the future. It is wrong to use the future tense in conditional and temporal clauses. That is, it is incorrect to say’ ‘He won’t do it unless you will ask him.’ ‘The correct sentence is ‘He won’t do it unless you ask him.’ In running commentaries, demonstrations of how to do a thing and some exclamatory sentences beginning with ‘here,’ ‘there,’ the simple present is used.
Ram passes the ball to Jacob who kicks it …. some grammarians call this ‘the instantaneous present.’
Take a glass, ll it with water and cover it with a black cloth.
Here comes the train.
Finally, the simple present is also used to describe a past happening as if it is happening now. It is called the historic present.
Ashoka now decides to give up the desire for fame and embrace Buddhism.”
Published in The Hindu on February 4, 1992.