Imperfect
The imperfect, often inaccurately called the imperfect tense in the classical grammars of several Indo-European languages, denotes a grammatical combination of past tense and imperfective aspect, and so may be more precisely called past imperfective. In English, the term refers to a form of the verb that combines past tense with similar aspects, such as incomplete, continuous, habitual, or coincident with another action.
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Famous quotes containing the word imperfect:
“The acceptance that all that is solid has melted into the air, that reality and morality are not givens but imperfect human constructs, is the point from which fiction begins.”
—Salman Rushdie (b. 1947)
“Gratitude is a burden upon our imperfect nature, and we are but too willing to ease ourselves of it, or at least to lighten it as much as we can.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)
“International relationships are ... preordained to be clumsy gestures based on imperfect knowledge.”
—Rebecca West (1892–1983)