To Be Late

I could almost not-crack the super lame, very lousy and not at all inventive joke, but in the end I felt like sharing it. Did you people ever realize that the Hungarian word ‘kések’ can (with the right amount of linguistic wit) be translated both as ‘knives’ (the plural or knife) and ‘I am late’? Haha…

Even so, there is a problem that many Hungarians stumble on when learning English. We Hungarians would say ‘Jenő mindig késik.’ This is a perfectly fine sentence; it shows an ongoing trend of the subject: never arriving on time. However in English, the sentence *’Joshua is lating.’ is far from perfect. (1) 

Late, you see, cannot be used as a verb. There is no option for us to say something like *‘Yesterday I lated.’ Or ‘Samantha will late again.’ Of course, as you well know by now (and if you don’t, scroll down and listen to Mr. Stephen Fry talk about this), language constantly changes. Perhaps, in 50 years, the above mentioned structures might actually work. Anyhow, for 2010 we need to memorize the nature of this expression so that we will not sound stupid in front of natives, or people with (even) better English than ours.

I am late. I was late. I will be late. These are the good ways of composing the expression into a valid sentence. Subject plus the correct form of to be (or any other verb that is sensible) plus late. You don’t need anything else, so don’t get uncertain and panic-pack prepositions, articles and other bits! Late is an adjective, and as such, it cannot have prefixes or suffixes of a verb. Let’s see a few sample sentences, just to make sure that we fully understand the way to use the word.

• Please do not be late again!
• Being late is an irritating habit of young girls these days.
• Although Jimmy is always late from work, he is a fine salesman and an excellent administrator.
• Whoever said arriving late to a date is chic must have never had much luck with relationships.  
• Jody was late this morning, however Mike came much later.

Hopefully, by now you got the feeling of the term and would never say things like the bad examples below.

• * Yesterday morning I was really lating from work.
• * Who lated the oftenest in September?
• * Paul is a later.

There you go. Have a few re-reads of the samples and memorize the structure: this is important to remember in life, since we all are late sometimes! :) 

(1) - an asterix (*) shows that the following structure is ill in some grammatic/stylistic/ semantic way.