‘A cab?’ said my husband. ‘Was the Underground out of order?’ I had been telling him about an interesting notice that I’d seen in a taxi, but he’d chosen to focus on thrift — never mind that I’d fought my way back from John Lewis with an extendable paint roller, a tray and 2.5 litres of Dawn Blue eggshell. And guess who’s going to be using it.
The interesting notice I’d seen was: ‘Black Cabs just got easier.’ It was an advertisement for the Hailo mobile app, but that wasn’t what interested me. The tense was the thing. It was the simple past, got, where one would expect the perfect have got.
Ah, you may say, it is merely that the auxiliary, have, has been omitted. A parallel would be the question, ‘Seen anything nice?’ meaning, ‘Have you seen anything nice?’ But it is more far-reaching than that.
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