The Past Exonerative Tense

There's a grammar trick so pervasive in institutional communication that someone gave it a name: the "past exonerative tense." It's the voice used when an action happened but nobody did it, when harm was suffered but nobody caused it, when accountability has been grammatically dissolved. Vijith Assar wrote an interactive guide that walks through the precise mechanical steps by which a clear statement can be rendered completely empty — and the final example is devastating.¹

The Mechanism

Start with a simple active-voice sentence. "A police officer shot a black person." Subject, verb, object. Clear as glass.

Step one: convert to passive voice. The object becomes the subject. "A black person was shot by a police officer." Same information, but attention has shifted — the person shot is now the grammatical subject, the shooter recedes.

Step two: switch to past tense. What happened in the past is less immediate, less urgent. The action recedes further.

Step three: replace definite articles with indefinites. "A police officer" instead of "the police officer." The specific actor dissolves into a category. Any officer could have done this, which means no particular officer did.

Step four — and this is where it gets truly corrosive — remove the verb entirely. Convert "shot" into a present-participle adjective: "shooting." Then attach it to a vague noun: "a shooting-related incident." The action is now an attribute of an event, not something anyone performed.

Step five: make both parties equal. Both the officer and the person were "involved in" the incident. The word "involved" applies symmetrically. The shooter and the shot are now grammatically indistinguishable participants.

Step six: make the adjective vaguer. Not a "shooting" incident, but a "shooting-related" incident. The actual shooting is now one degree removed — an incident related to shooting, not a shooting itself.

Step seven: restructure entirely. Instead of either party acting, focus on an abstract quality — say, the "injuries sustained" by one party. Both actors are now objects being acted upon by abstractions. Nobody is doing anything. Things are just happening.

Step eight: remove the original object. You don't even need to mention who was shot. "Injuries were sustained in a shooting-related incident involving a police officer."

Done. A police officer shot a black person, and the grammar erased it.

Why This Matters for Language

This isn't just a political observation — it's a demonstration of something deep about how grammar encodes power. The passive voice isn't inherently dishonest. Scientists use it constantly ("the solution was heated to 100°C") because the agent genuinely doesn't matter. But when the agent does matter — when the whole point of the sentence is that a specific person did a specific thing — the passive voice becomes a tool of evasion.

Assar cites the Washington Post's Radley Balko, who documented the "curious grammar of police shootings" across hundreds of press releases and news reports. The pattern is consistent: institutional language systematically moves agents out of sentences. It's not a conspiracy; it's a grammatical reflex that serves institutional interests so well that it perpetuates itself without anyone needing to plan it. Chomsky's propaganda model describes the same dynamic at the level of media framing rather than grammar — structural filters that shape output without anyone consciously deciding to distort.

The broader point connects to the old debate about whether language shapes thought. The strong Sapir-Whorf version — that grammar constrains what you can think — is probably too strong. But the past exonerative tense suggests something more insidious: grammar doesn't constrain what you can think, but it does constrain what you're likely to notice. When a sentence has no agent, you don't ask "who did this?" When "injuries were sustained," the natural follow-up is "how bad?" not "by whom?" Grammar doesn't prevent accountability, but it does make it require extra cognitive effort — and in a fast-moving news cycle, that effort is often not spent.

The Deeper Pattern

What I find most striking about Assar's walkthrough is that each individual step is defensible. Passive voice? Standard journalistic style. Past tense? It happened in the past. Indefinite articles? We're discussing a class of events, not one specific one. No single transformation is a lie. The dishonesty is in the composition — the cumulative effect of eight individually reasonable choices that together erase the most important fact in the sentence. It's Goodhart's Law applied to grammar: each step optimizes for a local criterion (objectivity, formality, balance) while the global outcome (accountability) gets destroyed.

This pattern extends well beyond police shootings. Corporate apologies ("mistakes were made"), diplomatic language ("regrettable incidents occurred"), medical euphemism ("the patient expired") — anywhere an institution needs to acknowledge a bad outcome without naming its cause, the past exonerative tense appears. It's the linguistic equivalent of legibility in reverse: instead of the state making messy reality readable, institutional grammar makes clear causation unreadable. The technique is so effective precisely because it exploits the legitimate functions of each grammatical transformation — functions that exist for good reasons in other contexts — and repurposes them as an erasure toolkit.

The antidote is embarrassingly simple: read the sentence and ask "who did what to whom?" If the sentence doesn't answer that question, and the answer matters, someone has done grammatical violence to the truth.