What’s wrong with the past tense?

Here is the Prime Minister of Barbados, as quoted in the Daily Nation on July 16, 2018, talking about recent statements by Dr. William Duguid: “[O]ne of my ministers would have given the impression that if you put down your car that you can literally not have to pay.” Ms. Mottley should have said that one of her ministers “gave” the impression, not “would have given” it. We should forgive her, because it is very difficult to speak as you would write, especially in off-the-cuff remarks.

But here is Peter Wickham, making the same mistake on July 15, 2018, in his weekly column in the Sunday Sun: “Although the Democratic Labour Party lost all of the constituency battles in the 2018 election, it is still possible to review individual performances using techniques that CADRES would have introduced to the public in our analyses previously.” Maybe you will say that Mr. Wickham is a political scientist and pollster, not a journalist. Perhaps the responsibility for catching these kinds of errors ultimately falls to the editor.

If so, you must explain this excerpt from the Nation’s own editorial, dated January 24, 2018, explaining why a strike by the National Union of Public Workers fell flat: “The public workers would have heard and given some credibility to the dire warning by former Central Bank Governor Dr. Delisle Worrell, who spoke of the need for widespread lay-offs in the public sector.” What’s the Nation’s excuse?

If you begin a sentence describing something that would have happened (“The public workers would have heard…”), you must follow up by explaining why that thing didn’t happen (“…had they been listening.”) That is how the conditional perfect tense works. If the thing did in fact happen, you should just use the simple past tense.

From the ubiquity of this error — you can’t read 3 pages of the newspaper without encountering it — I’m guessing people think it sounds fancy to clog up their sentences like this. It doesn’t. It sounds pretentious and silly, and it’s grammatically incorrect to boot.

If we want young people to write well, the people who ought to know better need to start setting better examples.