Dave's ESL Cafe's Student Discussion Forums

[yoshi-pooh]

Merry Christmas, everyone!

I'd like to ask you about the title of the book written by OJ Simpson.

Grammatically, I think the title should be "If I had done it" because OJ wrote it looking back on a past event and he says he actually didn't do it.
I wonder why "conditional II" was not used.

Could anyone tell me why the title is "If I did it", rather than "If I had done it"?

yoshi-pooh

[Eric Thompson]

Well, yoshi pooh, you are correct in your grammatical assessment: "If I had done it." is the proper way of saying it. But, OJ is not worried about grammatical correctness. He took a shortcut, which is probably the way he thinks. He played football in college and graduated, I guess, but, in this case, he wants to appeal to the regular American folk, who are not college educated. To them, "If I did it." sounds fine.

[yoshi-pooh]

Hi, everyone.

Eric, thanks for your reply.

May I ask another question related to the same subject?

Let's say a friend of yours was late for a morning tea meeting and the tea was cold when he had it.

In this case, which of the sentences below would you choose as what you would say?

The tea would have been hot if you were on time.
The tea would have been hot if you had been on time.

Thank you!

[2006]

You can say, '(In this case,) which of the sentences below would you say?'

Both are correct.

[Eric Thompson]

Dear Yoshi Pooh, Your second sentence sounds better: since the independent clause (1st one) is in a perfect tense, the dependent clause (2nd one) should be also. It's a case of parallelism being the guide...2006 is correct in shortening your lead-up question. She recommends a real shortening. A compromise shortening would be "...would you choose to say?" (removing the "as what you would" and inserting a "to").

[yoshi-pooh]

Hi, Eric, thanks again for your reply.
As a EFL learner, I cannot help being very sensitive to this kind of grammatical issue. I really appreciate your replies.

yoshi-pooh