For the first three-quarters of the twentieth century, the standard answer of B-theorists to the challenge posed by tensed discourse was that linguistic tense is a superfluous and even annoying feature of ordinary language which philosophically and scientifically trained minds are only too glad to dispense with. Russell, who may be ranked among the progenitors of the Old B-Theory of Language, opined, "Both in thought and feeling, even though time be real, to realize the unimportance of time is theate of wisdom."¹ By "time" evidently meant A-series time, which he regarded as obscurant: "...there is some sense—easier to feel than to state—in which time is an unimportant and superficial characteristic of reality. Past and future must be acknowledged to be as real as the present, and a certain emancipation from slavery to time is essential to philosophic thought."² Russell did not deny that human language provides a clue into the nature of the world; on the contrary, he affirmed that "Although a grammatical distinction cannot be uncritically assumed to correspond to a genuine philosophical difference, yet the one is prima facie evidence of the other, and may often be most usefully employed as a source of discovery."³ Yet in the case of tense, Russell held ordinary language to be an impediment to philosophical and scientific understanding of the world and therefore in need of expurgation of its tensed elements. Other Old B-theorists shared this same disdain for ordinary tensed language. According to Goodman, "...ordinary language deals with time by means of special devices that are used and understood with the greatest facility in everyday discourse but misused and misinterpreted with nearly as much facility in most philosophical discourse."⁴ Similarly Reichenbach, classing tense among the "Deficiencies of Traditional Grammar," declared, "Our present grammar as it is taught... is based on obvious misunderstandings of the structure of language. We should like to hope that the results of symbolic logic will someday, in the form of a modernized grammar, find their way into elementary schools."⁵ These thinkers, united in their conviction that language must be de-tensed, provided two fundamental ways of translating tensed sentences into tenseless, canonical statements: (i) replacing tensed expressions by appropriate dates and/or clock-times or (ii) analyzing tensed expressions in terms of token-reflexivity. Each of these two basic versions of the Old B-Theory of Language merits critical examination.