Got

When I was in fifth grade, my teacher expressed extreme disdain for the word got. Her dislike for the word was so intense, we spent an entire afternoon one day thinking of alternative words to use instead of got. As eleven year olds, we produced a large list. That list, however, was nowhere near as large as the one I've managed to compile in the subsequent two decades.

Why, just today, I received an email with the sentence,

"We just got a bunch of invoices, and need to match them up."

I read it as, "We just received a bunch of invoices, and need to match them to their requests."

Note the lack of "got" in that sentence. And the comma. I added the comma. And the dangling preposition? Gone.

I do that with just about every instance of "got" I come across. Although there are a lot floating around here, fewer than 40 of the 90 instances are actually from me. The rest are quotes from other people. Given how common "got" is in conversation, that's pretty good.

I wonder if I should start another section of gots, to go along with my license plates and letters, listing all my got replacements.

Hmmmm, you know, that might be too OC.

Even for me.