Put a BOLO out on the past perfect, now!

Having listened to a lot of audiobooks in January and being an inveterate listener of BBC Radio 4, I've noticed something...the past perfect seems to be disappearing. 'Be on the lookout' for the past perfect, folks. It seems it is becoming a rare and elusive thing. Rather like that 'butterfly of love' that Bob Lind was warbling about back in 1966.

Just this morning, I was listening to a programme about the life of Bessie Smith, the famous belter of blues songs. When she got her first recording contract, the man she was seeing pawned his watch to buy her a red dress. As the author wrote, this was the first present of her life. "When she sang, she wore the dress he bought for her." NO! That should be "When she sang, she wore the dress HE HAD BOUGHT FOR HER."

Just as the past perfect is also called the now rarely used term 'the pluperfect',  German also has various names for the tense, including the 'dritte Vergangenheit'(third past tense - after simple past and present perfect), Plusquamperfekt (about as current as 'pluperfect') and, best of all, the 'Vorvergangenheit'. 

As I have previously mentioned, German words are often much easier to understand because the say what they mean in German without recourse to Latin or Greek. 'Vorvergangenheit' means 'before past'. And that tells you how to use it.

In the sample sentence above, 'when she sang' and 'she wore' happened concurrently (i.e. at the same time). She wore the dress while she was singing. Same time. And we are talking about a past event. One day, she wore that dress while singing. The past perfect or 'before past' is used to refer to an event that happened before the event in the past that you've already mentioned. Hence "she wore the dress he had bought her (some time before she put it on and sang)".

Is that really so hard to comprehend? And yet, time and again, I hear the simple past (he bought) used where the past perfect is required.

And there seems to be a rare variant: the mangled past perfect. A very good psychological thriller by an Irish writer talked of something that 'had arose'. Say what? 'Had arose'? You take the simple past of 'have' (had) and stick the past participle of the verb behind it (or 'the third form of the verb' if you prefer). Arise, arose, arisen. So she should have said that something 'had arisen'. Sadly, this writer is not the only one that can produce a mangled past perfect. Five out of ten for effort, though. At least she was aware that the poor tense existed.