فعل مجهول و زامبی ها

The Passive Voice …and zombies

Today I’m at St. James’s Park in London, which is right next to Buckingham Palace. It’s all blurry you can’t really see it but trust me that is Buckingham Palace.

The passive form: What is it? Why do we use it? Hey dude! What are you doing? Me? I’m just enjoying the water and the sun! Oh that’s nice! Some water, sun, it’s all very relaxing, and… Whoa! What’s happening?! What? What? Oh man! Something bit me! Oh mate! That sucks. Ah! What bit you? I don’t know. Is it bleeding bad? Oh that’s pretty bad, huh? I don’t feel good. Ah, that’s awful.

Well, let me take your mind off that for a second. In English, what is the structure of a sentence? What?! Sentence structure? Oh, I, I really don’t want to talk about grammar. Oh come on! We’re doing a lesson! what do I need? I don’t know, a subject …and? A verb. A verb! Good! and what else? An object. Please get an ambulance or something. Yeah yeah, an ambulance, great idea! I’ll phone a helicopter or something! but first, that sentence! You said “Something bit me” what? yeah I think a shark bit me. Are you sure it was a shark? Dude! It’s the ocean! Sharks bite! Maybe it was a shark. Maybe it was Nemo. Maybe it was me. So if you don’t know the subject the action is more important, you should use the…? Why haven’t you called an ambulance!? That’s right! The passive form. So “Something bit me” becomes “I was bitten by something” or just “I was bitten”.

So, “something bit me” - That’s an active sentence and it changes to “I was bitten by something”, a passive sentence. Now this happened in the past, so that version of be, will be a past tense, “was” or “were”? Well the subject is “I”, so it’s not “were”, “was”, “I was” and that verb will always be in “Verb 3”, the past participle. It doesn’t matter if it’s a future tense, past tense or present tense, that verb is always verb 3, past participle, so “bite”, it’s always “bitten”. “I was bitten”. Be careful and remember that, when you use a passive voice, it completely changes the direction of the verb, so let me give you an example.

This sentence is an “Active sentence”. A zombie is biting me. Let’s use the same subject but change it to “passive”. Now it means this… Come here zombie! A zombie is being bitten by me. So be careful, it completely changes who receives the action. So why do we use the passive? Is it just to sound more formal? I mean yeah, it does sound more formal but that’s not the only reason. We already learned one reason, it’s because we don’t know the subject “Something bit me”, “I was bitten by something”. Maybe we don’t know it, or maybe it’s just really really obvious, like this example: You are being arrested. Who by!? haha! …I’m sorry. In both cases, the action is more important, the action is the focus of the sentence but there is one last reason and this could be more useful in social situations or political situations.

Let’s see the passive voice first: “I acknowledge that mistakes were made here”, “and he’s right mistakes were made”, “mistakes were made here”, “a serious mistake was made”, “clearly mistakes were made”. Hmm, interesting! Let’s hear the “Active voice”. “I think I made a mistake”, “yeah, I take responsibility for it”. And there you have it! In an active voice, you can see the subject, taking responsibility for the action whereas in the passive voice, you can avoid responsibility. So maybe you want to avoid responsibility for an action… you can use the passive voice. I’m gonna go knock on the Queen’s door, and see if she wants to come out and play.