{"id":11009,"date":"2015-03-13T12:51:54","date_gmt":"2015-03-13T12:51:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/blog\/?p=11009"},"modified":"2015-03-13T12:51:54","modified_gmt":"2015-03-13T12:51:54","slug":"the-historical-present","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/?p=11009","title":{"rendered":"The historical present"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The year is 1066 and William, Duke of Normandy, invades England to claim the throne he believes to be rightly his. Meanwhile King Harold Godwinson rushes to Hastings to do battle with William after defeating the Norwegian army of Harald Hardrada at Stamford Bridge.<\/p>\n<p>This is an example of the <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Historical_present\">historical or historic present<\/a>, which involves using the present tense to talk about past events. It is also known as the dramatic present or narrative present. I&#8217;ve noticed its use in a number of documentaries I watched recently. It also appears in novels, such as Charles Dicken&#8217;s <em>David Copperfield<\/em>, and Margaret Atwood&#8217;s novel, <em>The Handmaid&#8217;s Tale<\/em>, is written entirely in the historical present. It sounds rather strange to me. Does it sound strange to you?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The year is 1066 and William, Duke of Normandy, invades England to claim the throne he believes to be rightly his. Meanwhile King Harold Godwinson rushes to Hastings to do battle with William after defeating the Norwegian army of Harald Hardrada at Stamford Bridge. This is an example of the historical or historic present, which [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[104,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11009","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-english","category-language"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11009","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11009"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11009\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11009"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11009"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11009"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}