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At a wedding reception, the best man stood up to give a toast. He was an English teacher.
“If I had known I would be giving this speech,” he began, “I would have written it sooner. But I didn’t know, so I’m writing it now, even though by the time you hear it, I will have already written it.”
The bride’s father frowned.
“That was the past unreal conditional, the present perfect, and the future perfect,” the best man explained. “English has twelve tenses. I have just now used three of them in one sentence, and none of them describe the present moment.”
“Just say she’s lovely,” someone whispered.
“She is lovely,” said the best man. “Was lovely. Will have been lovely. Take your pick.”
He sat down. The groom leaned over. “You couldn’t just say ‘congratulations’?”
“Congratulations,” the best man replied, “is a word English borrowed from Latin in the 17th century. The original Anglo-Saxon version was ‘bliss.’ But that word now means a different thing entirely. Which is a better summary of English than anything I could possibly say.”
The bride smiled. She had married a grammarian. She knew what she signed up for.
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