Dot Wordsworth

Get

Get

issue 25 February 2012

English teachers are often remembered for two reasons. I don’t know which is more damaging. The first is for having made a pupil think she was writing well. The second is for having inculcated a few arbitrary rules, such as not to split an infinitive or to end a sentence with a preposition, thus enabling a pupil in future years to say: ‘I was always taught that…’

Someone wrote to me this week saying: ‘I was always taught that get is a word to be avoided. There is always a word you can use instead.’ Perhaps so, just as one could avoid the word lambent or entasis. The frequent use of lambent or entasis would certainly mar prose more than that of get. But, just as English teachers went to the trouble of contriving sentences in which only could be placed in different places with supposedly marked effect, so they composed, or copied out, some paragraph in which the replacement of the word get in a variety of senses produced most felicitous results.

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