Learn English – There is a current trend of using past tense, when meaning present tense.

past-tense

For example, someone on the phone said, "I was calling to ask for a form," when she meant to say, "I am calling to ask for a form."

I hear this consistently, and usually in customer service situations. It is also being used by the under-30 crowd, of which my daughter is one, but as an out of state resident, she also finds it odd, and thinks it may be a coloquialism.

What's confusing is the person asking the question is typically unaware of their tense confusion, almost in the same way that someone saying, "like" cannot hear themselves. I'm sure I say similar things, but I try to weed them out, for clarity of communication.

Can anyone shed some light on this usage, or have others noticed the trend?

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For example, someone on the phone said, "I was calling to ask for a form," when she meant to say, "I am calling to ask for a form."

There's nothing wrong with that past-tense usage. It is standard usage, and has been for a long time. If anything, it is the expected usage and is considered to be the more polite version than your preferred version. (Aside: questions similar to yours do come up every now and then on grammar forums.)

Here's some related info from the 2002 reference grammar by Huddleston and Pullum et al., The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (CGEL), page 138:

4.3.2 Past time reference in combination with politeness/diffidence

The preterite [the "preterite" is the same as "past-tense" -- F.E.] is commonly used in preference to the present in examples like the following, where it is considered somewhat more polite:

[39]

i. I wanted to ask your advice.

ii. I wondered whether I could see you for a few minutes.

The politeness/diffidence feature is also found with the past progressive: I was hoping to see the Manager. The prototypical case (for either aspect) is that illustrated in [39], a declarative with 1st person subject, but 3rd person subjects can be used when I am talking on someone else's behalf: My daughter was hoping to to speak to the Manager. And the same usage carries over into interrogatives, with a switch to 2nd person subject: Did you want to see me?

The following could help in understanding the apparent time related discrepancy: why the past-tense is being used instead of present-tense. CGEL page 138:

Politeness/diffidence feature as an implicature

This conventional use of the preterite is quite consistent with its basic past time meaning. It would not be correct to say that [39], for example, is an ambiguous sentence, interpretable in one sense as describing my wants at some time in the past and in another as a more polite, more diffident version of I want to ask your advice. Rather, the first of these interpretations corresponds to what the sentence means, and the second is a context-dependent implicature deriving from that basic, literal meaning. In the absence of any contextual indication that I am referring to some definite time in the non-immmediate past, T(r) will here be interpreted as immediate past time. As the situations are states, not occurrences, use of the preterite does not entail that the state no longer obtains. And since there is nothing to suggest that the state has ended, the interpretation will be that the state also obtains at T(d), so that [39] conveys "I want to ask your advice", "I wonder whether I can see you for a few minutes".

The added politeness associated with the preterite comes from avoiding explicit reference to the immediate present: I distance myself slightly and thus avoid the risk of appearing too direct, possibly brusque.

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Could is the past tense of can as it is in may/might, will/would. Using a particular form (past or present) must be adhered to.

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I sympathize with the heartfelt cry, "Does the English language not specify which tense that we must use when sentences are constructed like this?" The answer is sort of. "The English language" is really the speakers of the English language, and they don't always agree with each other, and they're not always consistent, especially in informal communication like the spoken dialog that you're reporting.

The first case you cite is, I think, the result of reported speech (or in this case, thinking.) If Mr. Bruce were reporting his thoughts directly, he would have told the narrator: I thought, "I will tell you when I see you." But Mr. Bruce tells the narrator a report of this thinking: I though I'd [I would] tell you when I saw you." This is called "backshifting the tense" for a past report ("thought"), and it takes "will" to "would," and "see" to "saw."

The second case has almost the same structure, but with a slight syntactic ambiguity about the reported thought. Is it of

    "I will tell you."

or is it of

    "I will tell you before you get to the office."

In the latter case, "get" should be backshifted to got. In the former, the temporal clause is not part of the report, and the verb "get" is in the present, which is used for near-future events.

Of course, that future sense clashes with the past "I thought," but getting the tenses technically correct would require something like, "Before you get to work, I will have thought that I had told you," and no one would say that.

There also is some sense of obligation in the sentence, not only that the speaker would warn the narrator but that he should. In which case, the sentence "I thought I should tell you before you get to work" is fine with the present tense indicating an ongoing situation.

Remember that it's dialog, and people don't always speak "correctly." Perhaps the author deliberately tried to mimic everyday speech, or perhaps he got it "wrong" in the first place.

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