It's NOT Happening NOW

This may seem a strange thing to rant about, but i am becoming more and more annoyed byu the use of the present tense to describe things that happened in the past.

This particular plague seemed to start a few years ago. So far as I can tell iot all began with a Radio 4 programme. Now this is a bit surprising as this particular BBC station is normally loistened to exclsuively by pedants like me. There's abot six million of us in the UK.

The offending programme is called "In Our Time". On its web page it describes itself as a discussion of the history of ideas. Now forgive me if I'm wrong but I thought that it is generally accepted that hsitory happened in the past.

A few programme titles seem to support this nagging suspicion of mine

Arab Conquests: The 7th Century World Order
The Norman Yoke: 1067 and all that
The Terror: When Madam Guillotine ruled France

And then we get various erudite types who will discuss these significant historical events. And what do they say?

The Moors march into Seville
William imposes capital punsihment for many offences
Robespierre dominates the Committee for Public Safety.

But these things are not happening now. They happened in the past. Robespierre no longer dominates this Committe for the simple reason that he snuffed it 216 years ago. William similarly hasn't impsed anything for quite a while.

Now I think this has happened in order to make history seem more relevant, but in fact it just makes these folk sound daft. Which is a terrible shame really as many have great insight.

I fear I have lost the fight on this, particularly as no-one else seems to be bothered. It is worth bothering. It is infecting our culture with novels now adopting this style. It is inelegant; it is just not very nice on the ear.

But most of all it devalues the world of the intellect. Describing historical events in this way cheapens and devalues the messages being put across by some of these great intellects. It is cheap populism at its worst.

So please folk give historical events the respect they deserve and discuss this in the past tense.