They were cursing in the pluperfect tense and using curse words as gerunds.
In a tautly condensed narrative encompassing disparate time periods, the author's lapidary prose is tainted now and then by an overuse of the pluperfect tense, and the sheer number of feminine pronouns leaves a few referents unclear.
By contrast, one's "because motives" consist in the environmental, historical factors that influenced the (now past) decision to embark upon the project and that can only be discovered by investigating in the "pluperfect tense," that is, exploring those past factors that preceded that past decision.
Pluperfect tense is a form of past tense that occurred before another action (someone DID something BEFORE he/she did something ELSE).
Slavic has almost no traces of the Indo-European old perfect tense but, from combinations of a participle (verb + suffix l + masculine, feminine, or neuter endings) and forms of 'to be,' created new perfect (and pluperfect) tenses.
Nicolson's point was not that Agatha Christie is better than George Eliot but that readers who seek out mystery novels are looking to escape not from life but from literature, from the "pluperfect tenses of the psychical novel".
It has two numbers, two genders, three moods, three cases (subject, oblique, and vocative), three persons, and five tenses (present, imperfect, perfect, pluperfect, and future, grouped into two aspectual conjugations, the "present" and the "perfective").
Verbs have many different tenses, Present, Perfect, Imperfect, Future, Pluperfect, and Future-Perfect.
Six tenses -- present, imperfect, future, perfect, pluperfect, and future perfect.
The indicative mood has 8 tenses: present, imperfect, perfect simple, compound perfect, pluperfect, future, popular future, and future in the past.
"When a language has a range of tenses such as the perfect, the imperfect, the pluperfect, each of which makes other kinds of statement possible, why on earth not use them?" Pullman asked, adding that present-tense narration is a "wretched fad".
