I was teaching an English class of mine in Paris the difference between the present perfect tense and the past tense (stay with me!). One difference is that you can mention a specific time when you use the past tense but it’s often not possible when you use the present perfect. I gave as an example a line from a Simon & Garfunkel song, A Most Peculiar Man. The line was: “He died last Saturday” – the point being that you wouldn’t say, “He has died last Saturday”. This is especially puzzling to French speakers because in French the tense used for the ordinary past looks like the English present perfect. At the end of the lesson, one of the class came up to me to say that he wouldn’t be able to come to the following week’s lesson because he had to go to his aunt’s funeral. I expressed my condolences. “Thank you”, he said. “You see, she died last Saturday.”