The Verb Story

Chapter 7: Conjugation of 'Be'

Sammy smoothly slinked across the hallway to Tyler’s locker. “Salutations, Sammy,”Tyler said joyfully.Tyler was always happy –he just couldn’t be put in a bad mood.

“I’m assuming you’ve heard of how to conjugate ‘be,’ right?” Sammy said with the acidic lick of his tongue.

“Why, no I haven’t, but I’d love to learn,”Tyler said with a smile.

“Alright,” Sammy said taken aback by this new kind of behavior from one of his “subjects” as he liked to call them. “As you hopefully, know,” Sammy said, “‘be’ is the most common and most irregular verb in English, so you need to know its conjugation. In the plural forms, present tense goes with ‘are,’ past tense goes with ‘were,’ and future tense, goes with ‘be.’ All the perfect tenses end with ‘been.’ I hope you know what the perfect tenses are because I don’t want to waste my precious breath explaining them to you.”

“Okay,”Tyler said, his smile only slightly smaller, his eyes not sparkling quite as much as usual.

“The singular conjugations are a bit more complex. The present tense ends with either ‘am,’ ‘are,’ or ‘is’ –hopefully your inferior mind can figure out when to use them. The past tense will use either ‘was’ or ‘were,’ depending on the word. The future tense will always be ‘will be.’ The present perfect will always either be ‘have been’ or ‘has been.’ The past perfect will always be ‘had been.’ Finally, future perfect will always be ‘will have been.’ Hopefully you understand because I won’t be repeating myself,” Sammy said with each word appearing to be more and more forceful.

“Got it,”Tyler said, clearly baffled.

“Okay, okay, okay,” Sammy said to himself, “Examples. ‘He has been.’ This is present perfect…”

Sammy droned on and on about more and more examples, until he looked around and realized Tyler had left.