Miss California is convinced Perez Hilton cost her the crown.

“If I had any other question, I know I would have won,” Carrie Prejean told Fox News.

Here’s the problem — well, one of the problems.

Carrie is speaking in the past perfect tense, describing an action (the pageant interview) that happened before a related event (her analysis of it). To form such a sentence, use the word had followed by the past participle.

* If I had known Perez Hilton would be a judge, I wouldn’t have participated.

* I had left the pageant before they arrived.

In this case, had is the past participle. Carrie had Perez’s question. It still has to follow the word had, which indicates the tense. So Carrie should have said, “If I had had any other question, I know I would have won.”

When you come so close to being named Miss USA, it’s understandable that a woman would have a difficult time dealing with the past.

Perez’s response in this indirect exchange also contained a grammatical error.

“I think it’s kind of very rude of her to be saying in interviews like she was yesterday that if she had been given another question she would have won and that she felt like a winner,” the blogger said.

While he mastered the past participles, he erred with his use of the word like. Like is used for nouns. He acted like a jerk. She complained like a baby. But when a verb is present — in this case, saying — you need a conjunction.

Perez should have said, “I think it’s rude of her to be saying in interviews, as she was yesterday, that if she had been given another question she would have won.”

So there you have it: The exchange between the Beauty and the Blogger is flawed on both sides.

Good grief.