I stand by my usage of the past perfect in this sentence of mine:
“A writer who is himself a cyborg of sorts—a tiny computer
had been embedded in his skull to restore his hearing—has come up with a compelling book where he speculates that humanity will eventually evolve into a mass cyborg consisting of a worldwide network of computer-mediated minds.”
This usage of the past perfect form “had been embedded” is meant to indicate that the embedding was done at some unspecified time in the past. The simple past tense would be called for—I’d say grammatically mandated—if the precise time of occurrence is specified, as in this construction of that sentence:
“A writer who is himself a cyborg of sorts—a tiny computer
was embedded in his skull in 2001 to restore his hearing—has come up with a compelling book where he speculates that humanity will eventually evolve into a mass cyborg consisting of a worldwide network of computer-mediated minds.”
It’s true that, as Alek quoted with great relish, the
Merriam-Webster’s 11th Collegiate Dictionary defines the past perfect as “of, relating to, or constituting a verb tense that is traditionally formed in English with ‘had’ and denotes an action or state as completed at or before a past time spoken of,” but any English-speaker who really knows his grammar should know that this is simply the vanilla definition of the past perfect tense—in other words, the basic, doctrinaire usage drilled into English learners’ heads in primary school. In actual usage of the past perfect, however, the later past action used as reference for the earlier action need not be stated in the sentence if the context is clear.
Below, for instance, is the past perfect tense in its vanilla form:
“The vodka mix
had been shaken before it
was served to the guests.”
Because the later action, “it was served to the guests,” is obvious in that sentence, it can simply be implied in the following past perfect construction:
“The vodka mix
had been shaken.”
Taken out of context and served all by its lonesome as Alek would have it, that sentence can also be constructed in the simple past tense, as follows:
“The vodka mix
was shaken.”
It would be a different matter, of course, if the time frames and events need to be specified in detail in a narrative account as part of, say, an investigation of a crime. In that case, it would be mandatory for the unfolding past actions to be stated in the simple past tense, as in the following example:
“The vodka mix
was shaken at precisely 5:30 p.m. before it
was served to the guests at 6:30 p.m. At 6:45 p.m., one of the guests
fell ill, his mouth frothing.”
The use of the past perfect in my sentence in question is pretty standard in English journalism and in both fiction and nonfiction narratives, so I am intrigued why Alek—who in another, earlier guise in this Forum had given me the impression that he was such a persistent scourge of the bad English of Australian newspapers that they decided to ban him from their op-ed pages (a feat that he actually took great pride in)—and his grammarian friends seem to be woefully unaware of it.
One more grammar issue needs to be settled before I rest my case on this matter. Alek asked in his usual smart-alecky, condescending way:
“Had been”, Joe? Is it not still there?”
To find out to his total satisfaction, I suggest to Alek that he read Michael Chorost’s
World Wide Mind: The Coming Integration of Humanity, Machines and the Internet in its entirety. But this I can tell Alek now: regardless of whether or not Chorost’s cochlear transplant is still in his skull, it wouldn’t really make a difference to the grammar of my sentence that he (Alek) had taken issue with.
