In the Walt Disney cartoon, Pinocchio is delighted when he hears that on Pleasure Island, little boys get to stay up late and smoke cigars! This use of get, meaning opportunity or privilege, is very common in spoken British and American English and yet I have never come across examples of this in any ELT materials, nor in the major dictionaries, apart from Macmillan’s English Dictionary for Advanced Learners.
The other day in the staffroom at Hilderstone College, Seth Lindstromberg came up with a particularly intriguing use of get. We had been talking about beer festivals in a country with similar drinking habits to those in England. I asked if car drivers took risks with drinking and driving. Seth replied “No, the guysget to spend all day drinking in the beer garden and then the little lady gets to drive them home.”
The first get to (the guys get to spend all day at the beer festival) suggests opportunity or privilege - as in the Pinocchio example - but then there is also an ironic use: “... the little ladygets to drive them home.” (the wife has the privilege/is lucky enough to drive them home - I don’t think!).
Seth’s sentence struck me as being so rich and so typical of how useful get is. It is also very typical of native speech. One of the elements that distinguish English native speech is the frequency and variety in the use of get. Typically, one of my students will say “I like my job because I am able/I have the possibility to meet lots of interesting people.” There is nothing wrong with that but a native speaker would almost certainly say, “I like my job because I get to meet lots of interesting people.”
Get is far too complex a word for me to attempt any sort of definition, but we all know the main uses of get. For example:
ELT materials do cover these uses fairly well, plus the range of phrasal verbs: get away with, get over, get up to, get on with, get by etc. However, there are a few uses, some old and some new, that are very common and that are not so well represented in ELT materials:
Get often suggests some sort of resistance or difficulty. “She got in through the back door.” suggests that the house was locked or that she shouldn’t have been in the house and that perhaps she slipped in through the back door because the front door was being watched.
Compare, for example, “She got in through the bathroom window.”, with that strange line from the Beatles’ Abbey Road album, “She came in through the bathroom window, protected by her silver spoon.”
“She got in through the bathroom window.” suggests that she broke in or climbed through the window, maybe the window was small. Some sort of difficulty or resistance is suggested.
“She came in through the bathroom window.”, however, sounds odd. As no resistance is suggested, one can imagine the woman floating in through the window. Maybe her high-class connections (“protected by her silver spoon“ - silver spoon as in “born with a silver spoon in her mouth”, meaning having a privileged background) made everything easy for her: even entering through a bathroom window. A very odd line indeed.
Another example: “I managed to get three tickets for the show.” Here get complements managed in suggesting that I have been lucky or artful in getting hold of scarce tickets. Get underlines the difficulty in a way in which buy would not. Perhaps because get does not specify how something was done, it suggests trickiness and difficulty.
There is one use of get that is hard to explain. I have heard Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells complain about people saying “Get off of it!” or “Get it off of the table” or “Get off of my foot.” The of does not seem to have any grammatical function here and yet this is a very common form among both American and British speakers. Traditionalists see it as a sign of decay in standards of modern speech. However, the use of get off of is not new. In one of John Ford’s 1950’s films, John Wayne looks straight into the eyes of a gunman who is trespassing on his ranch, and says in that cool, deliberate drawl of his, “Get off of my land.” Another example: Do you remember the Rolling Stones song – “Hey you get off of my cloud”? In both these cases get off of is being used quite deliberately, not by people who don’t know any better but by “artists” exploiting natural, idiomatic speech rhythms.
I am not sure how to explain the presence of the redundant of in this structure. The answer could be that this is simply a spoken variation. There are a number of phrasal verbs that contain an of, for example as in “Get out of it!” - meaning go away or avoid doing something. Perhaps get off is simply associated with and therefore used like get out, which needs an of. Alternatively, because get off or get out sound like one word - pronounced getof or gerrof, getout or gerrout - people just naturally add an of. There is a similar native speaker oddity in “If I’d av known”, which is a very common spoken form (but not a written form) both in the U.S. and in Britain, even among educated speakers. In “standard” English, of course, it should be “If I’d known.” It could be that “If I’d av known” is a variant form (“If I would have known“) but I find it more likely that it simply sounds right/consistent because it balances with would have: If I’d av known, I’d av phoned you.
I’d like to finish with another use of get which I heard last weekend. Behind our house there is an executive estate - new, detached houses with parking for two cars etc. Some of the houses have been bought by Londoners with good Estuary/Cockney accents. Well, an argument broke out last week when one neighbour lit a fire at the bottom of her garden. It produced a lot of smoke and I heard another neighbour shout out, in a very Cockney voice, “Oi! Pu(t) Tha(t) Firerah(t)!” (“Hay! Put that fire out!“). An argument ensued and the bonfire owner shouted, “You wanna get yourself sorted!” (meaning, “There is something wrong with your life/sort yourself out/get a life“), and the other replied angrily, “Naa, you ge’ yoursewf sor’id” (“No, you get yourself sorted“).
Yes, get really is a complex word!
© James Banner