cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/30396216
this post was submitted on 01 Dec 2025
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You can pretty much always reword the sentence to avoid this. It's kind of always just bad grammar tbh.
"He wanted to make sure that that window had been closed."
"He wanted to ensure that window had been closed."
Why not just say, "He wanted to make sure the window was closed."?
To reword the OP, "All my good faith had no effect on the outcome."
To reword the title, "I hate when that happens."
Agreed, almost every time this happens, I think someone's just being lazy or intentional. As a matter of personal preference, I reword sentences to exclude the word "that" altogether whenever possible, so the idea of two consecutive "that"s being unavoidable severly strains my credulity.
sometimes when telling a story you want to have a different voice, active voice versus passive voice or something. "All the good faith I'd had" hits different than "All my good faith"
there's better ways to word this though, while being able to keep the same tone
Right, I forgot about passive vs active. Good point.
One of the major problems encountered in time travel is not that of becoming your own father or mother. There is no problem in becoming your own father or mother that a broad-minded and well-adjusted family can't cope with. There is no problem with changing the course of history—the course of history does not change because it all fits together like a jigsaw. All the important changes have happened before the things they were supposed to change and it all sorts itself out in the end.
The major problem is simply one of grammar, and the main work to consult in this matter is Dr. Dan Streetmentioner's Time Traveler's Handbook of 1001 Tense Formations. It will tell you, for instance, how to describe something that was about to happen to you in the past before you avoided it by time-jumping forward two days in order to avoid it. The event will be descibed differently according to whether you are talking about it from the standpoint of your own natural time, from a time in the further future, or a time in the further past and is futher complicated by the possibility of conducting conversations while you are actually traveling from one time to another with the intention of becoming your own mother or father.
Most readers get as far as the Future Semiconditionally Modified Subinverted Plagal Past Subjunctive Intentional before giving up; and in fact in later aditions of the book all pages beyond this point have been left blank to save on printing costs.
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy skips lightly over this tangle of academic abstraction, pausing only to note that the term "Future Perfect" has been abandoned since it was discovered not to be.
Which window? This window or that window? Any window? Yeesh. Had you thought to specify that that window needed closed we wouldn't need this discussion.
Which window? This window or that window? Any window? Yeesh. Had you thought to specify that that window needed closed we wouldn't need this discussion.