‘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. A clearer example than got is forgot.
Got is identical in form as either the simple past or the past participle: I get, I got, I have got. Forgot, as the simple past, is different in form from the past participle, forgotten: I forget, I forgot, I have forgotten. Those who buying books through Amazon and AbeBooks will notice a difference in the websites’ inquiries about passwords. The UK Amazon site asks: ‘Forgotten your password?’ – short for: ‘Have you forgotten your password?’ The AbeBooks UK site asks: ‘Forgot your password?’
I think the Hailo advertisement uses this form of words because it sounds up to date. The usage is no doubt American in origin. On a website discussing marketing I came across this florid example, conveying a pluperfect sense: ‘When they just got done eating some good pork.’ The internet erases differences between British and American English. Among the things that just got easier are: the search for ET, insider trading, sexting, helping the homeless, parenting teens and booking a last-minute beauty appointment. A website that broke the trend by announcing that ‘Learning Spanish has just got easier’, let itself down by adding: ‘Why Has Spanish Now Easier To Learn?’ I doubt that many of those things have in fact got easier, even if I wanted to do them, nor, I fear, has painting a ceiling.
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