Nuts and Bolts: telling the past.

 How do you convey that something has happened in the past?

Let us count the ways.

You can add extra words, like, for example, adding have to I have come.

If you're speaking English, the most natural way to signal the past might be to bung some letters on the end of a word (as in the -ed of the word bunged). But if, on the other hand, your language comes from sub-Saharan Africa, Meso-America, the Pacific North-West of America, or some parts of Papua New Guinea, then the obvious thing will be to bung some letters on the front.

Apart from the fact that it must make compiling a dictionary difficult, why not? 

If none of those options appeals then you can change the middle of a word. English does this sometimes, as in sing and sang. German does it rather more often. That kind of change doesn't make much logical sense, and they are a pain to learn, but they work fine once you know them.

If that doesn't suit you then you could always put some extra letters into the middle of a word, a wheeze that Tagalog sometimes employs when changing tenses.

If you speak a language where tone is important then you can signal the past by changing the tone of one of the vowel sounds.

You can even change a word completely, the way English changes go to went.

Most languages use a variety of all or some of these techniques. In fact, if you can think of a way to signal a tense change, then there's probably a language somewhere that uses that technique.

There are some ways of signalling the past you probably won't have thought of, too. In American sign language, for instance, to signal the past you sign finish at either the beginning or the end of a sentence while saying the word fish (a shortened form of finish).

And I say to myself, what a wonderful world...

Word To Use Today: any word that uses a slightly weird way of signalling the past.