The present perfect tense allows us to say things like “She has been department chair for two months”, or “I’ve known him for ten years.”
We often see such statements in resumés and biographies. And every time the present perfect is used, the situation it describes is poised to go out of date by the next year or month or day or hour or minute.
Since so much modern text is digital, designed to be seen on-line or in other electronic form, why don’t we have a way of dealing with this?
For example, on-line documents could contain a since tag, enabling statements like “She has been department chair for XXX months” to remain up to date:
“She has been department chair for <since start=”november 2012″ unit=”month”>.”
“I’ve known him for <since start=”2002″ unit=”year”>.”