Like Christmas, your sentences are only as complicated as you make them.

There’s a cartoon that invariably shows up around this time each year, and it never fails to make me laugh. There are a few variations, but it basically boils down to this: Ebenezer Scrooge is cowering in his bed, huddled beneath the covers, while a spirit hovers above him. The headline reads “The Ghost of Christmas Future Perfect Passive” (or something similar), and the speech bubble says, “Ebenezer! You will have been disappointed with your life!” Hahahaha! It never gets old.

While out with some fellow word nerds recently, the comic came up in conversation, and we started debating the most complicated tense in the English language. (Other groups were talking about sports and politics, but IYKYK.)

There are 12 core tenses in English: the basic three (present, past, and future), which reflect time, and four aspects (simple, perfect, continuous, and perfect continuous) for each time. If it’s been a few years (or perhaps decades) since your most recent grammar lesson, here’s a quick review:

• Simple tense is, well, simple. You’re referencing something that simply happened in the past, is currently happening, or will happen in the future.
• The perfect tense is formed by combining a form of the auxiliary verb have with the past participle of a verb, and it refers to a completed (not ongoing) action.
• The continuous tense combines a form of to be with the present participle of the verb in question to indicate an action in progress.
• Perfect continuous tense combines a form of have, followed by the past participle been, which is then followed by the present participle of the verb in question. These verbs show that an action started in the past and is continuing.

Back to the bar. To keep ourselves organized, we set out a cocktail napkin for each of Charles Dickens’s ghosts (i.e., the three basic tenses). Then we added the aspects to each napkin. Before we could even get the sleigh off the ground, though, a few Scrooges among us protested our use of the term continuous to denote ongoing action in a tense because they had been taught that the correct term is progressive. They’re the same thing in English, so we flipped a coaster (who has a coin these days?) to decide and went with continuous. Now we were all on the same page, or cocktail napkin, as the case may be.

Since we were aiming for something complicated, we decided to use the most irregular verb we could think of — to be — because in for a penny, in for a pound, right? Our cocktail napkins looked like this:

The Ghost of Christmas Past

SIMPLE PAST: Santa was a jerk to Rudolph.

PAST PERFECT: Santa had been a jerk to Rudolph.

PAST CONTINUOUS: Santa was being a jerk to Rudolph.

PAST PERFECT CONTINUOUS: Santa had been being a jerk to Rudolph.

The Ghost of Christmas Present

SIMPLE PRESENT: Santa is a jerk to Rudolph.

PRESENT PERFECT: Santa has been a jerk to Rudolph.

PRESENT CONTINUOUS: Santa is being a jerk to Rudolph.

PRESENT PERFECT CONTINUOUS: Santa has been being a jerk to Rudolph.

The Ghost of Christmas Future

SIMPLE FUTURE: Santa will be a jerk to Rudolph.

FUTURE PERFECT: Santa will have been a jerk to Rudolph.

FUTURE CONTINUOUS: Santa will be being a jerk to Rudolph.

FUTURE PERFECT CONTINUOUS: Santa will have been being a jerk to Rudolph.

With all our ghosts in a row, we decided that perfect continuous was clearly the winner. We debated whether one of the perfect continuous examples was more complicated than another. They all blend past and ongoing action, but future perfect continuous won most of us over with its triumvirate of auxiliary verbs.

The last call was looming, so we moved past tenses and wondered what we could do to this poor, unfortunate sentence to further complicate it. Perhaps a modal verb like could or might? Or how about the subjunctive? That’s always good for throwing a wrench into perfectly good syntax. But then we noticed the Grinch-like sneer on one friend’s face. And so here it is, wrapped in a beautiful bow — future perfect continuous tense in the passive voice: This year, Rudolph will have been being mistreated by Santa for 61 years.

God bless us, everyone.