SINCE is a useful word in English. You can use it to tell people when a present situation started, for example, I’ve worked as a teacher SINCE 1996, and it’s maybe even more common to talk about the duration of time during which something hasn’t happened, so if you want to be nasty, you can remind me that I haven’t written one of these blogs SINCE June…
SINCE + Past
In the examples above, SINCE is used with a definite time reference (like ‘1996’) to say when an action started. The main action (‘I have worked’) is always in the present perfect tense in English, because it started in the past but is still continuing now. It’s sometimes hard to remember the specific time or date when something started and we find it easier to fix the time by using a past event like ‘when I left uni’ to produce a sentence like “I haven’t drunk absinthe since I left uni”. or “”I’ve hated Jon since I met him”. In these cases, the past event that provides the start time always has to be in a past tense.
Limitations of SINCE
The problem with SINCE is that it’s irrevocably linked to now, the moment of speaking. Actions can start at any time in the past, but they have to continue now. If they’ve already finished when you speak, you can’t use SINCE (and you can’t use the present perfect to describe them). Similarly, SINCE makes no sense in the future, and this is why you need a more flexible structure to talk about events that start or finish before or after now.
Flexibility with FROM and TO
To talk about the start and finish of events that have already finished or that haven’t yet started, you need the more flexible FROM… TO…. You can say that you worked last night FROM 8am TO 9pm and that you’re going to sleep tomorrow FROM midnight TO midday. You can even say that you plan to stay FROM now TO (or UNTIL) Friday, because this user-friendly structure accepts any pair of time references, including ‘now’.
SINCE is very common in spoken English, and if you’re happy using it, you should carry on. However, for those who find its grammar (and pronunciation) difficult to master, it might be easier to quietly abandon it and stick with FROM… TO…
