A reader gave me a rap on the knuckles the other day. I’d written this: “The longer I’ve lived in an American protectorate — that is, for most of my life — the more I feel for those Indians who lived under us British”. He commented that “you’re trying to stretch an unstretchable magnitude — the length of time you have already lived”.

He was right. My phrase mixed up the tenses. I should either have written, “the longer I’ve lived... the more I’ve felt” or else “the longer I live... the more I feel”. Since I’m still living in an American protectorate, I could correctly have used either version. But not a mixture of the two.

It’s true that my life in Britain stretches by 24 hours every day, so my reader was overstating his objection. But not unreasonably: he could fairly take me as meaning my life up to a fixed moment, say the time I wrote or the time he read the result. My grammar was mistaken, even if not grievously so.

This sort of phrase, the more X the more (or less) Y, is thoroughly idiomatic, but use it with care. People often stick in an unnecessary that, as in the longer that I live, the happier I am; or the more people that I meet (never whom, don’t ask me why not), the more that I prefer animals. This isn’t positively wrong, but it’s pointless.

Getting the tenses right is not easy, as I’ve demonstrated. The longer I lived... the more I felt goes for some past state of affairs that has now ended; the longer I’ve lived... the more I’ve felt may do the same, but usually means that the process is still under way; the longer I live... the more I feel definitely concerns something that is ongoing.

No logic

And things can get more complex. If you’re voicing some general truth, such as the bigger they are, the harder they fall, or the faster you drive, the sooner you arrive, both verbs are in the present tense. But not so if you’re talking of some specific future event: the earlier you leave for Delhi tomorrow, the sooner you’ll meet your sister.

Sometimes you have a choice here. You can say the richer Anil grows, the unhappier he is. Yet the richer he grows, the unhappier he will be also is correct. That’s because the first version is a general truth, albeit only about Anil, not the world at large; the second one is really about future events.

Indeed you might suppose that both verbs in this second version, not just one, should or even must be in the future tense. But not so. The future is the poor relation among tenses. Why do we say when he grows rich, he will be less happy? Both the richness and the unhappiness lie ahead of Anil, so logic says use the future for both. But English doesn’t.

And at times one verb can be omitted: the sooner they get married, the better. Or indeed both verbs: the sooner, the better is a very common phrase (and, for the record, a perfectly good sentence, whatever pedants may say about its verblessness).

All these phrases have one oddity, one which we who use them seldom even notice. Why the sooner or the richer rather than simply sooner or richer? There’s no noun involved to justify that the. Yet it has to be there. I have no idea why. The French omit it, though that may only be because their version of rich — richer — richest is riche — plus riche — le plus riche, so their le is already being used to say something quite different. But German doesn’t use its equivalent either.

Still, no one claims that English — even leaving its crazy spelling aside — is a logical language. Or that those who tell others what’s right and wrong in it can’t make mistakes of their own.