3 ms·

Honestly, I don't recall hearing many people relate stories verbally and even if they did, it'd still sound 'wrong' to me.

• klodolph 6y ago
  It's common enough. I'm guessing that you just don't notice it because it's so natural.
  • Natsu 6y ago
    I doubt that. The few times I have heard it, it sounded jarring and incorrect to me.
    • klodolph 6y ago
      Going to be frank... I don't believe you. I don't believe that you're lying, but I don't believe that you can accurately linguistic details about conversations you hear (and you probably have even less accurate memories of conversations if you are a participant!). Linguists use audio recordings to make transcripts and analyze the audio later... because people are exceptionally bad at remembering what they actually hear in real conversations. When linguists ask subjects questions about what they heard or said in conversations and compare the subjects' answers against the transcripts, the subjects' answers are often a poor reflection of the transcript. This explains why you are not alone in thinking that it's jarring... the human brain is simply not good at remembering what is actually said in conversation. So you'll forgive me if I defer to the experts. If you look at what linguists say about the present tense... well, there's a lot of ink spilled over the past hundred years. Transcripts of casual conversations show that people in real life telling stories set in the past will freely switch between present (the "historical present") and past tense so freely that it's almost shocking to see it written down. There's relative agreement that the present tense doesn't really indicate that something takes place in the present, but it's used more as a contrast against other tenses. This makes a lot of sense, because it's exactly how tenses like the pluperfect work--the pluperfect tense does not make sense in isolation and cannot be understood as referring to a specific point in time without context. The same is true for the present tense.