On the Matter of Triggers, Language & the Future

The Triggers

How often do you get triggered? Perhaps a better question is – how often do you react? Or even better yet – how often do you choose to react?

Because once you become fully aware of your triggers (and to be clear, I mean everyday pet peeves, not the trauma-induced ones), patterns, and habits, they become your choices. You consciously and willingly choose to react in a certain way. Instead of letting go, or remaining silent, or simply ignoring the event.

Anyway, personally, I try to react as little as possible, especially in situations that are not contained in the context where such reaction would be adequate or necessary.

However, there are situations that, hopefully, will forever be my choice to react to. Let me briefly explain.

Yesterday, I stumbled upon a funny video where one person asked the other what the “partic-I-ple” of the verb “go” was.

First of all, it’s “p-A-rticiple”, and second, the question is either wrong, or it requires two answers, but then it should be “(…) participle-S (…)”

Naturally, the teacher in me just couldn’t resist and had to check the comments to see if anyone else felt the same. (Man, I got hooked like a silly trout that swallowed a neon bait that says “BITE HERE.” To be fair, I should have just scrolled. But here we are.)

Perhaps I should also mention that, as a former teacher, I am not really impressed or triggered when people don’t know certain things, because there’s so much to know and learn. Or, as I used to say to my students (who were all adult learners): “If you knew everything, I wouldn’t have a job.”

However, one thread of comments in particular caught my attention. It was from a person who got into an argument with several other commenters over “went vs. gone,” claiming, in short, that “the tense and the participle were the same thing, and it’s just a matter of when you want to use it.” They were actually winning the argument because they claimed “they were studying to be an English teacher,” which gave them the advantage in terms of knowing the language and terminology itself.

The Language

Note: Those of you who are not interested in the actual difference between tenses and participles, please scroll on to the next section. Those of you who are like many of my former students and struggle with the concepts of tenses and participles, please read on.

A participle and a tense are, in fact, not the same thing.

A tense expresses time in terms of past, present, and future. For example: I ignored the comments section (in 2010); I ignore the comments section (most days); I will ignore the comments section (starting tomorrow, I promise).

A participle is a verb form used alongside auxiliary verbs to create continuous and perfect aspects. A present participle ends in -ing and helps form continuous tenses, whereas a past participle helps form perfect tenses. Its ending depends on whether the verb is regular or irregular. Regular verbs end in -d (such as moved), or -ed (such as filled). To simplify, irregular verb forms can be found in the irregular verbs list, in the third column.

This is exactly the part that gets confusing. Regular verbs have identical forms for the past simple tense and the past participle. With irregular verbs, these two forms can differ, but they don’t always have to:

Verb Type	Infinitive	Past Simple	Past Participle
Regular	file contract	filed contracted	filed contracted
Irregular (same form: past simple & past participle)	have read sit	had read sat	had read sat
Irregular (different form: past simple & past participle)	go begin break	went began broke	gone begun broken

 

Participles, both present and past, can function as adjectives (e.g., confusing / confused; breaking / broken, etc.).

In addition, the present participle is used to form continuous tenses (“be” + “-ing”), and the past participle is used to form perfect tenses (“have” + “pp”) and the passive voice (“be” + “pp”).

The sentence “I ignored the bait yesterday” is in the past simple tense, just like “I went down a rabbit hole last night.” Conversely, the sentence “I have ignored a lot of bait this year” is in the present perfect tense (“have” indicates it’s present, and “ignored” indicates it’s perfect) and uses the past participle form. This is exactly like the sentence “The world has gone off its rocker.” (Not really an optimistic sentence, but grammatically sound.)

What is important to note here is that just because the past simple tense and the past participle can sometimes take the same form, it does not mean they are the same thing. If it’s still confusing, think of it this way: in real life, identical twins can also “take/have the same form,” but they do not have the same identity.

The Future

This brings me back to the person in comments, who reminded me a lot of myself at one point.

Back in 2007, I started working for a language school in which every Friday, teachers would take turns sharing knowledge about a topic of their choice.

Since I have always been a freak for the practical, when it was my turn, I created a bunch of games, exercises, and activities for teaching the narrative tenses. Everyone loved the presentation and found the materials highly useful and usable. Not long after I finished, an older colleague, whom I admired a lot, took me aside and said in the most considerate manner: “I think it’s ‘NAIR-uh-tiv’ (/ˈnær.ə.tɪv/) not ‘nuh-RAY-tiv’ (/nəˈreɪ.tɪv/), so you might want to check that, you know… for the future.”

A part of my ego died by violent suffocation in embarrassment at that moment right there, but I also learned a very valuable lesson:

It’s perfectly fine not to know something. You learn as you live. However, not allowing oneself the possibility of being misinformed or wrong closes the door to all learning, both for oneself and those we have met or will yet meet in our life.

And this is a lesson which everyone, not just future fellow teachers, should know. Or, in simple terms: master this, and tenses and participles will take care of themselves.