In my Spanish studies I have just started revising that rather obscure tense, the conditional perfect. I was amused to read the following description of this tense in my textbook, the excellent Spanish Verb Tenses by Dorothy Devney Richmond:
Of all the tenses, the conditional perfect holds the dubious honor of being the only one to express no action. It is the favorite tense of excuse makers. The conditional perfect is used to refer to an action that would have taken place, but did not because something got in the way or some specified condition was not met.
In any sentence containing the conditional perfect, there will always be an “if” or a “but” lurking about, either stated or implied. People whose verbiage contains a good deal of conditional perfect sentences most likely are those who don’t get a lot done and have loads of excuses for all they don’t do, for example:
I would have paid you, but I couldn’t find my chequebook
If it weren’t so difficult, I would have baked you a pie
As I read this, I came to the uncomfortable realisation that I am not immune to using the conditional perfect tense myself on occasions. So I took the opportunity to write out a few recent instances:
Once I had done this I could see that all these statements occupy a sort of never-never land. They are in fact completely pointless since they describe nothing. The only things that could usefully be stated were:
Having stated the facts in this stark way, I then started asking the obvious question: “So what?” The replies to that question usually take a form like this:
Exercise:
You might like to try the exercise of writing down some some examples of how you have used the conditional perfect recently yourself. And then for each occasion strip out the excuse and ask yourself the question “So what?”
(This article was originally published in my newsletter several years ago)