Give 'get' A Fair Go: It's Quite Nice, Really
Sydney Morning Herald
Saturday January 5, 2008
ITA BUTTROSE is a brave woman - if only for putting "get" in the title of her new book, Get In Shape, written with personal trainer Lee Campbell.
You see, "get" has been getting a short shrift since the dawn of formal schooling.Schoolteachers put it in the same category as "nice" - namely, vague to the point of meaningless (despite the fact that dictionary.com gives some 63 senses of "get", covering its transitive, intransitive, phrasal and idiomatic forms). Said schoolteachers also make it the object of entirely inappropriate aesthetic judgments - "ugly" and "common" - (even though "a", "the" and "and" are just as common and no one comes down on them like a ton of bricks). The misfortune here is that "get" is a word. Were it a household appliance, it would be praised inordinately for its dexterity, versatility, transparency and all-round utility. As a prejudice, "get" hatred is locked up in the dark recesses of the place in the brain that never sees the metaphorical light, for it rarely gets taken out, dusted over, reappraised. It goes back at least as far as 1762, the year Bishop Robert Lowth's A Short Introduction to English Grammar appeared, with its solemn disapproval of the past participle "got" . Back in the bishop's day, "gotten" was the approved participle and it was "gotten" that got taken to the New World on the Mayflower. Today, outside of American English, "gotten" gets its haul of rotten tomatoes just as "got" once did. There's logic in neither prejudice, each underlining the idiosyncratic nature of prescriptivist taboos, then and now.Poor little "get" is a casualty of the blatant favouritism long afforded formal language, especially the written mode. The get-passive form ("he got fired") is clearly more "of the street" than the be-passive form ("he was fired") and we know that the language of the street has long been disparaged as inferior, a judgment that masquerades as linguistic but is at heart solidly social. In any case, different forms carry different nuances. "He wasn't elected" isn't "he didn't get elected" and neither is it "he didn't get himself elected".In fact, "get" often serves by hinting at the effort entailed or the process involved in an action: "You need to get that mole looked at"; "It rained all weekend and we didn't get to go swimming". Which brings us back to Buttrose's "get" - supremely apt, in context, given that the acquisition of shape necessitates multiple and regular doses of "get".ruth@laraconsultancy.com
© 2008 Sydney Morning Herald