For or Over the last ten days, I had been looking for ...
I am going to make up two similar examples below.
(A) For (or Over) the last ten days, I had been looking for my lost watch. Yesterday, I gave up my search.
(B) For (or Over) the last ten days, I had been looking for my lost watch. Three days ago, I gave up my search.
May I ask two questions?
(1) In this context, I think For and Over can be used interchangeably. They refer to an event that happened at a past time and has been continuing up to a later past time before now. In my examples, "now" makes a reference to "today", meaning that I stopped searching on the tenth day. This example makes sense.
Do you agree with me?
(2) I think (2) does not make sense because my search lasted ten days, but my next sentence indicates that I had stopped searching before the tenth day.
Do you agree with me?
Please give me your opinion. Thanks a lot.
Top answer
(1) I agree. I see no difference here between "For the last ten days" and "Over the last ten days". (2) The first sentence states that you gave up your search yesterday, not now (today), so it really suffers from the same issue.
- (1) I agree.
- I see no difference here between "For the last ten days" and "Over the last ten days".
- (2) The first sentence states that you gave up your search yesterday, not now (today), so it really suffers from the same issue.
- It means you stopped searching on the ninth day rather than the on seventh day.
- Regardless, neither of these sentences would really bother me.
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(1) I agree. I see no difference here between "For the last ten days" and "Over the last ten days".
(2) The first sentence states that you gave up your search yesterday, not now (today), so it really suffers from the same issue. It means you stopped searching on the ninth day rather than the on seventh day. Regardless, neither of these sentences would really bother me. I would under
0If you want to exclude "today", I think you need to use "for ten days". Thus, you get
I had been looking for my lost watch for ten days when I finally gave up yesterday / three days ago.
0ansonguyI think For and Over can be used interchangeably.
Agreed.
For me [For / Over] the last ten days means the ten days preceding the moment of utterance, so the past perfect doesn't work for me there. If you change it to [For / Over] the previous ten days, it works for me.
With that change, whe
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