"Get" this

[dfisher]

I got this link in my e-mail the other day from a journalism profs list

http://newsroom101.com/NR_exercises/get.html

The whole point of this exercise is to "get rid of get."

Now, there certainly are some sketchy uses on that list, but there are many that I doubt would even stir the breeze on many current copy desks.
What set me to this post was a lab I graded tonight in which a significant number of students (while missing more important things) changed the sentence "I get seasick" to "I become seasick." (Note: That's been picked up somewhere before my class.)

I marked them "pointless change" because it seems to me to be the kind of hypercorrective stuff we've been bemoaning at times on this list, and I wonder if this "get" exercise doesn't really serve to perpetuate that.

Just seeking your thoughts.

Doug

[fev]

Yeah, that sort of thing suggests that "editing" is nothing but hunting for strings of letters.

Next time you order "pointless change" stamps, I'll take a couple.

[john.mcintyre]

Just so.

[Chris Wienandt]

Wow.

The amount of time wasted by whoever put this together must be considerable, not to mention the amount of time stolen from the students who are subjected to it.

[A_Reese]

I'd love to get a job in academia. Er, obtain.

[Mike O'Connell]

I understand that anti-gettism seems to be a particularly British prejudice.

[dfisher]

The amount of time wasted by whoever put this together must be considerable, not to mention the amount of time stolen from the students who are subjected to it.

That's what kind of bothered me. It was put together by Gerald Grow, an excellent teacher of editing and the language and one of the proprietors of the fine Newsroom 101 site. And unless I misread the e-mail, it was endorsed by Deb Gump, another great teacher and booster of copy editing. Formerly of Ohio U, she is the founder of editteach, another excellent site and for years has organized the editing profs breakfast at AEJMC.

I sort of see what he was trying to do -- get students to think about the richness and specificity of language. Still, I fear that, as we sometimes see with AP stylebook entries, it will be misconstrued, in this case as a "kill all the gets" situation, just as we sadly see too often with the words "that" and "to."

[Chris Wienandt]

I'm all for specificity, but I'm also for sounding as if we live in the world that real people inhabit. Most of the examples in the exercise seemed perfectly clear to me, and the ones that didn't were far enough off base that you'd be inclined to rewrite them anyway.

I've run into a lot of young copy editors (and a few older ones) who miss the forest while watching out for these kinds of trees.

[Jim Thomsen]

Friends don't let friends listen to Geoffrey Pullum.

[fev]

I don't think it's a case of specificity vs. the real world, or a case where "get" is on one side and specificity is on the other. It looks like an exercise put together to justify a language whim in the guise of "precision."

Things like "I don't get grammar" or "I could get into grammar" are colloquial; they're specific enough, informally, among subgroups, but that makes them of limited value for general use. If you spend too much time these days saying "I could get into that," some people will wonder what you mean and others will think you're an aging hippie.

Lots of the informal uses demonstrate that informal can be about as specific as it gets. You can talk about the tone and register of "get his ratty dog out of the house," but if you say it's imprecise, you're more than likely blowing smoke.

"Get your feet wet" -- again, what would be the "precise" way of saying that, other than "get your feet wet"? That's about as standard as you can get. English builds some weird structures, but that doesn't mean they're in any way nonspecific.

"He's got no time" or "you've got to see" -- oh, come on. Sometimes you feel like an auxiliary, sometimes you don't. (Excess auxiliary support often sounds "better," as long as it's spoken with the right accent.) The assignment is "replace forms of 'get' with words that express the precise meaning." What's the "precise meaning" you'd express here?

If we teach people that all these uses of "get" are equal and equally imprecise, we're doing them a great disservice, whether we're writing stylebooks or pontificating in front of a class.

Oh, and Geoff Pullum is a pretty engaging writer in addition to being a kick-ass grammarian. May I recommend "The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax"?

[john.mcintyre]

"The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax" is a trenchant and entertaining essay -- and an enduring warning about the tendency in journalism toward unthinking reptition of dubious statements of fact.