Troy Patterson wrote an article today for Slate.com entitled “What kind of moron watches Ultimate Fighting?” and coined a brand new grammatical element – the “ultimate tense.”
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.
The X-Treme Court has used the Ultimate Tense in its wickedest most hard-core opinions, such as Mountain Dew vs. Taco Bell vs. Tony Hawk vs. Spiderman (1997).
