Re:A Farewell to LWN
by nescioquid on Thursday December 23, 2021 @03:34PM
(#29666151)
The usage here implies that the action is habitual, not continuous, nor final, e.g. "Every time I tell the story, I forget the name". She could have said "I have forgotten", but that implies a finality the writer wants to exclude. If her habitual forgetting was confined to the past, she might have written "I used to forget...".
I think everything you've said is correct; I just wanted to add the idea of an habitual aspect.
EDIT: found a reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_markers_of_habitual_as...
Re:A Farewell to LWN
by da_chicken on Thursday December 23, 2021 @04:37PM
(#29666798)
Yeah, habitual tense is very subtle in most forms of English.
The meme-famous Oscar Gable quote, "They don’t think it be like it is, but it do," is an example where some vernacular forms of English emphasize it more. Here, "be" is the habitual tense of "to be." It's not "bad" English. It's a tense you're not recognizing.
In English, if you say "I forget X," it means that you still don't recall the information in the present. For example, "I forget my first phone number," you presumably forgot it before this moment, but saying, "I forget" conveys that you haven't remembered in the meantime.
If you use the past tense, "I forgot," it leaves open the possibility that you remembered the information later. For example, "I ran into Jake at the mall, and I was about to say hi, but I forgot his name." The speaker forgot the information in the past but has since remembered.
Hope this helps!