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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.
Shakespeare did not have one of those English teachers. The usages of get are illustrated by 43 quotations from his plays, in the Oxford English Dictionary entry for it, which runs to 40,000 words — long but not as long as the 72,000 words on set. Nor did anyone successfully warn the translators of the Authorised Version of the Bible against using get. It appears 244 times, counting got and gotten, but not counting gat. Gat is often used reflexively in the Bible: ‘they gat them up’.
Sometimes the Bible uses get to mean ‘beget’, but in its beloved genealogies that we so underrate, the normal word, in the past tense is begat. (The past tense of forget in the Bible is forgat, and the past participle is forgotten except in Deuteronomy 24: 19, where, if thou ‘hast forgot a sheaf in the field’, it should be left for the stranger, the widow and orphan.)
Got is in Britain today the ordinary verb of possession: ‘I’ve got.’ Americans tend to say: ‘I have.’ So, when you ask one: ‘Have you got a beautiful house?’ he will answer, ‘I do,’ as if the question had been ‘Do you have?’
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