The view expressed by J. Avery in 1885 that the Vedic ‘unaugmented verb-forms’, commonly styled ‘injunctives’, could be used in a present sense, as well as the preterite and modal senses confirmed by later usage, has had serious consequences. Firstly, the standard translations of the Rgveda and Avestan Gathas make use of this licence with a degree of arbitrariness and uncertainty which recalls the hit-or-miss tactics of Sanskrit and Pahlavi commentators with regard to verbal forms in general. Secondly, the description of the Vedic verbal system has become unmercifully complicated by the consequent imputation to the IE parent language and then to Vedic and Gathic themselves of a twofold verbal system embodying both tense–mood paradigms and paradigms which are at most faintly aspectual. A key role in the development of this theory, which postulates a grammatical structure and an impotence to convey specific meaning virtually without parallel, fell to L. Renou whose article ‘Les formes dites d'injonctif dans le Rgveda ‘(Étrennes de linguistique offertes far quelques amis à Émile Benveniste, Paris, 1928, 63–80, referred to below as R.), is still quoted with approval at the present day. I propose here to show that this article can no longer be considered to offer any confirmation of the view that the unaugmented verb-forms can fulfil the role of a present tense and must therefore be indifferent as regards tense.