The difference between active and passive is not whether there is an 'action' but the syntactic role of the person or thing 'acted upon'.
In a sentence cast in the active voice, the subject is the Agent - the 'doer' - and the direct object is the Patient - the one 'acted upon' or 'done to'.
Agent loves Patient.
When that sentence is recast in the passive voice, the Patient becomes the subject and the Agent disappears, or is relegated to a prepositional phrase.
Patient is loved [by Agent].
So intransitive verbs - verbs which do not take a direct object - cannot be cast in the passive voice, because there's no Patient to become the subject of a passive sentence.
Agent dies. ... there's no Patient who can ✲'be died by'!
BE is an intransitive verb: it has no Patient, only an Agent to whom some quality is imputed, so it cannot be cast in the passive voice. It is always active.
✲ marks an utterance as unacceptable
The first phrase could have been:
He's been putting up with it, his whole life.
You put up with something that is annoying, irritating, or painful. For instance, he may suffer from severe backache but because there is no cure, and the doctors cannot help him, he has no choice but to put up with the pain.
Now, why anyone would put this type of sentence in the passive voice is quite beyond me. The agent, the man, is not performing an action on his back, rather it his back that is inflicting an action.
The original phrase is however:
He has been putting it up his whole life
the passive voice equivalent is:
It has been being put up his whole life
But it sounds awkward, clumsy, unnatural and confusing. The present perfect continuous tense is rarely used in the passive voice. Compare the following phrases
- Active 1) He wrote two books about Moriarty.
Passive 1) Two books about Moriarty were written by him.
A 2) He has written two books about Moriarty.
P 2) Two books about Moriarty have been written by him.
A 3) He has been writing a book about Moriarty all his life.
- P 3) A book about Moriarty has been being written by him all his life.
P 3 Sounds confusing, despite it being grammatically correct. No one speaks like that and I doubt there are many examples of this type of passive construction in literature or in any type of journals (at least I hope not!)
For sentence number 2 it is exactly as @relaxing stated in his answer. The correct form is:
It used to be said in similar situations
Compare
The BBC has an article on the passive voice construction using the present perfect continuous
Generally, we avoid using the continuous form of the passive with the
future, present perfect, past perfect and future perfect, although
present continuous and past continuous are quite common and sound
quite natural in the passive voice.
PASSIVE
Simple Continuous
Present: It is cleaned... It is being cleaned...
Past: It was cleaned.. It was being cleaned
Future: It will be cleaned... xxxx xxxx xxxx
Present Perfect: It has been cleaned... xxxx xxxx xxxx
Past Perfect: It had been cleaned... xxxx xxxx xxxx
Future Perfect: It will have been cleaned xxxx xxxx xxxx
Study these further examples of use and note how we avoid using the
continuous form of the passive in the final four tenses listed:
Best Answer
As a learner, I should say, unfortunately, both examples are wrong in formal English.
getting and being are present participles; they participate in sentences and take on several roles. However, they cannot be used as a main verb.
If you want to imply that your computer shows signs that it will stop in the following seconds, I will suggest that you construct a sentence as below:
Passive present participles are usually used to focus on the object which is receiving something at the moment. For example: