A New Tense

Troy Patterson on Ultimate Fighting in today's Slate:

In a clip, Shamrock, a veteran known as "the most dangerous man in the world," expressed his belief that Ortiz is a punk. Meanwhile, Ortiz, a punk, forwarded the notion that Shamrock is over the hill. Cut back to Shamrock: "Tito Ortiz is going to find out who Ken Shamrock is, was, and is now." The "is now" in that sentence wasn't really a redundancy. Shamrock was employing a new tense—the ultimate tense—to describe how he was about to be bringing it, how it was about to have been brung.