Got

I hate the word got. OK, hate is a strong word. How do you know if a word is strong anyway? "That Hate, it lifted the whole paragraph above it right off the page, while Of could not even lift a measly period!" What would a word eat to gain Popeye like serifs? Certainly not spinach. How would it open the can? Besides, hating takes a lot of work, and I am much too lazy to put forth that effort. Let us just say I dislike it a lot whenever it is convenient.

Got. It is an ugly sounding word to my ears. All harsh and abrupt. Rhymes with rot. Not a pretty word either by definition, but fitting as unit of sound and meaning. Kind of like manky. I have heard it used several times and while I have never read a definition of it, I am confident that what comes to mind when I hear it is accurate enough. Words like bot (short for robot), cot, dot, hot, jot, lot, not, pot, sot and tot fail to bother me at all, so it is not the "ot" ending that bugs me, just got itself. Plain, old, ugly, got.

A totally useless word in my opinion. I believe it came into use as a filler word and just leached into our vocabulary like a remora onto a shark. Only the remora is a beneficial parasite to the shark. I am not an etymologist so I make no claim to accuracy, but if you pay attention got usually follows a contraction. As in the famous "You’ve got mail!" Think about it. When you un-contract the sentence it becomes "You have got mail". The got is extra. "You have mail" is a stand alone sentence. "You’ve mail" is the same thing but it "sounds funny" to most people so they put in got as a pseudo verb to make the sentence sound right. Why is it that we spend so much time creating all these acronyms, contractions, foreshortenings of words et al and then go and add got?

Some will say that got is a real word and is of import to the language. They may use "I got an A on my report card." "He got hit by a car." "The cat got on the sofa." My response is an enthusiastic "So what!" In these examples got just lazily replaces a perfectly good word that already existed, "I received an A on my report card." "He was hit by a car." "The cat climbed on the sofa." Got does nothing but limit the vocabulary and make the language bland.

On top of that the two uses contradict one another. First, we expend the energy to add got after a contraction as an useless pseudo verb filler, then we turn right around and use it as a generic real verb when we could have used a word with real meaning if we bothered to think about it.

One of the beauties of the English language is that it tolerates change so readily. I believe that adaptability is what makes it, in my opinion, the strongest language on the planet. The fact that English is the universal language in the world seems to bear this out. Even the Chinese, who percentage wise tie up most of the population, are clamoring to learn my native language. This world wide exposure allows us to continually add new and exciting things to our language as more people and cultures add their own twists and turns to our spoken word. It is a beautiful thing.

Unfortunately this flexibility also allows in things that rub some people the wrong way. Like got for me. You probably have your own personal favorite dislikes as well. Fantastic. We also have the freedom for that as well. I am sure I say things and use and mispronounce words regularly that drive other people nuts. It took me quite a while before I realized that I was mispronouncing the word succumb as subscum. I do not know if I misread it the first time and locked in the incorrect pronunciation then or if it was some kind of dyslexic thing. Either way I felt like an idiot when I figured it out.

Even with my great dislike of got I still find it coming out of my mouth occasionally. It has become another of those invisible words that are used so frequently that they are heard but no longer register in the brain. When you listen to someone speaking do you actually hear every word they say? Every a, if, is, it, but, and, or, etc? Or do you listen in kind of a short hand - short ear? Where you hear key stand out nouns, verbs and descriptors and mentally fill in the rest? I received an e-mail a while back where someone had written a paragraph of text in which all the letters in the words were jumbled except the first and last letter. You read the paragraph first and then were told it was jumbled after. Apparently the brain latches onto the patterns of words while you are reading, not the spelling. If all the letters are there and the first and last are correct you will sight read it correctly on average no matter what the spelling is. Do we do the same kind of thing with our ears? I think so.

Have you ever heard a recording of yourself talking when you were not aware it was being done? Were you embarrassed by how many umms, uh-hus, ya-knows and other trash that came out of your mouth? I certainly have been. No matter how hard you try to banish them from your vocabulary they just creep right back in. These words are the cockroaches of language. As long as they still exist they will keep crawling back out of the deep dark corners and infesting our speech.

I have chosen got as my personal cockroach. Put on your cowboy boots and help me stamp it out. Or not.