Ishikawa and his fellow Youth Ambassadors spend their last afternoon bowling.

Question

Hello, everyone!http://richmondconfidential.org/2012/03/28/japanese-youth-ambassadors-tour-richmond/ Ishikawa and his fellow Youth Ambassadors spend their last afternoon bowling.May I ask why the present tense, not the past tense, is used here?

Clive · Accepted Answer

Hi,

It should be 'spent'.

Clive

CSnyder · Answer

I don't think so, Clive.  To me, that sentence looks like it's meant to be a caption for a photo that should be (but isn't) in-line with the text.  If that's true, present tense is fine.

Clive · Answer

Hi,

I looked, and there was no photo shown at that point in the article.
Perhaps it got dropped somehow,as you suggest. I don't know.

Clive

Anonymous · Answer

This, in my opinion, is okay. Even if this is an article reporting a past event, every verb in it does not necessarily have to be in past time. Note that in the paragraph preceding this sentence you see the present and future used in tenses. And in the picture, the caption uses the present tense: "The youth ambassadors....make a stop at a bowling alley."

In the sentence in question, the present was probably used for literary effect: the present tense is suddenly thrown at you right out of the blue, and the sentence is a one-sentence paragraph, separated from everything else. So the sentence sticks out like a sore thumb, and using the past tense in it would not really fit with it, since that would make it seem like a run-of-the-mill sentence that should be embedded within an ordinary paragraph. So the present tense is appropriate for this particular sentence. This sentence might also be looked at as a continuation of the caption of the picture, that is: "Ishikawa and his fellow Youth Ambassadors spend their last afternoon bowling (as the picture above shows)."

CSnyder · Answer

I mostly think it's a caption because it is an orphaned sentence and doesn't really fit in context.  It also happens fairly frequently that internet news articles are imperfectly transcribed from what was presumably the article submitted by the author for publication in a newspaper or magazine.

Ishikawa and his fellow Youth Ambassadors spend their last afternoon bowling.

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