August 2005

got grammar?

by Robert C. Cumbow

Thanks to the International Dairy Foods Association (and their ad agency), everyone now seems to think that it’s wonderfully clever to use two-word slogans and titles in which the first word is “got.” It’s getting old, and has just about run its course. But it raises (not “begs”) the question whether “got milk?” and the like are proper constructions at all.

“Got milk?” is, of course, just a shortened form of “Have you got milk?” But where did that “got” come from? Isn’t it more correct to ask, “Do you have milk?”

We hear the “got” construction in spoken English quite a lot. “Got any change?” “Have you got the time?” Or the phrases that inspired this discussion, “I’ve got a question for you” and “You’ve got mail.”

The prevailing wisdom has long been that this kind of construction is peculiar to colloquial speech, and should be avoided in writing and formal speaking. 

Clearly, in each of the examples cited above, the “got” is superfluous. “I have” and “You have” do the job, without shoving the word “got” in there. Granted, “Have you the time?” and “Have you any change?” sound a bit stuffy and artificial (though many generations have grown up uncorrupted by “Have you any wool?”). But “Do you have the time?” and “Do you have any change?” work just as well as “Got any change?” and “Have you got the time?” It’s a mystery why people will ask “Have you got any peanut butter?” when “Do you have any peanut butter?” is perfectly clear and correct, and doesn’t sound like a pistol fired off next to your ear.

We might analyze this as follows: “Have” means simply “is in possession of,” while “got” is the past tense of “get” and means “received,” “acquired,” or “obtained.” Now if there’s a jar of peanut butter in your pantry, you’d say “I have peanut butter”; but if you’ve just returned from the store, where you purchased some, you might say “I’ve got peanut butter” (though in that case, it would be more appropriate to drop the “have” and say “I got peanut butter”). Anyway, the distinction between “I have” (for “I am in possession of”) and “I have got” (for “I have acquired”) seems to have blurred over the years, and “got” has come to be used interchangeably with — or even redundantly to — “have,” creating the “I’ve got” formative.

An interesting sidelight on this is that “gotten” is considered an acceptable participial form of “get” in American English, while in Britain it is severely frowned upon. In the United States, you wouldn’t bat an eye at a construction such as “He’s gone and gotten himself arrested,” while in the U.K. one would use “got” or risk castigation. Strunk and White, in their venerable first edition of The Elements of Style, preserve the British preference. By the mid-Seventies, though, Theodore Bernstein of The New York Times was drawing the distinction between the American and the British usage. Still, Bernstein and other usage guides continued to emphasize that neither “I’ve got” nor “I’ve gotten” is acceptable in written English; “I have” is always preferred.

Which brings us to “You’ve got mail.” Why is it that “You have mail” doesn’t quite have the ring that “You’ve got mail” has? It’s because, as noted earlier, “have” denotes simple possession, while “got” carries the additional sense of acquisition. If I log on and learn “You have mail,” it may well be the same mail I had all along; while if I log on and am greeted with “You’ve got mail,” I know at once that this is new mail that I’ve recently received. Thus “You’ve got mail” is a defensible construction, since the message is “You have received mail”; whereas “I’ve got a question for you” should actually be “I have a question . . . .”

Not So Clever Segue

The word “segue” comes from music, and refers to an uninterrupted transition from one musical theme to another. It’s pronounced “seg-way,” in case anyone is unsure about that. And now I’ve ruined my clever segue from “You’ve got mail” to the following additional email-related item (unless you’re willing to forget that this paragraph ever happened).

Is the plural of email “email” or “emails”? A reader asked this some months ago, after noting that “email” is a new but increasingly essential word in the legal lexicon, and observing that some people in his office used the term “emails.”

As a threshold issue, let’s acknowledge that the word “email,” barely 30 years old,1 is still in a transitional stage, and its spelling has not yet become standardized. I follow the Wired magazine usage guide, which recommends “email” (and “Web site” rather than “web site” or “website”). The hyphenated form “e-mail” runs a close second in usage, according to the online Wikipedia, though the hyphen is hardly necessary, and some regard the term “e-mail” as downright un-American. The alternate forms “E-mail” and “Email” have all but disappeared.

Now, back to that great question about the plural of “email.” The word “email” is a derivative of the word “mail,” and the plural of “mail” is “mail.” So it would seem that the proper plural of “email” would have to be “email.” However, many of us often say “emails,” including yours truly. I’ve thought about this, and I think I have figured out the reason for it.

You could say “I get lots of mail” and “I get lots of email,” and there would be no inconsistency. But if you’re talking about a specific number of items, you wouldn’t say “I got three mails”; you’d say “I got three letters.” But units of “email” aren’t called letters, and there is no equivalent of “letter” in the world of email. I suppose you could say “messages,” but that would eliminate clarity: they could have been email, voicemail, instant, or paper messages. They could even have been telegrams, if anyone uses those any longer.

So when we want to refer to more than one piece of email, we say “I got three emails.”2 We also say “send me an email” or “I got an email from her” — usages that are not analogous to the way we use the word “mail.” Of course we could be more precise and always say “email message” rather than simply “email.” But I don’t think that’s likely to catch on. So my best guess — and it is only a guess — is that we’re free to use “email” as both a collective noun (like “mail”) and as a concrete singular or plural noun (“an email,” “several emails”).

New Saws

The emergence of “email,” and the burning usage questions it inspires, is a good example of how our language is constantly changing (and, one hopes, growing). Another way in which our language changes (really bad segue) is that some words and phrases that have well established meanings seem—gradually or even suddenly—to take on very different meanings in popular parlance. I’m not talking about the calculated adoption and assignment of completely new meanings for existing words, as occurred with such words as “gender” and “gay.” I’m talking about a dramatic change in the actual public understanding of an expression.

Let’s take an example: The phrase “it’s all downhill from here” used to mean that the hard part of a task was completed, and all that remained was the easy part—comparable to coasting down the other side of a hill once the summit had been passed. Today, however, the phrase “it’s all downhill from here” is generally understood to mean that things have stopped improving, and from now on they can only get worse. William Safire noted this new understanding in one of his New York Times Magazine columns not long ago, and he didn’t have any better an explanation for it than I have. This is no small change in meaning; it’s a 180-degree turnabout, from “things are getting better” to “things are getting worse.”

How did a phrase that meant one thing come to mean its exact opposite? My best guess is that some influential person, probably in the government, misunderstood the term and misused it in a very public context, others picked it up, and the previously wrong, now new, meaning was propagated by viral marketing and mass imitation. This happens a lot in bureaucracies.

Here are some other examples of words and phrases whose meanings have changed in our own lifetimes—some of them in just the last few years.

Carrot and stick: In the old Our Gang Comedies, which somewhat younger readers of this column will recall as The Little Rascals, and which most readers of this column have probably never heard of, the kids had a particularly memorable means of transportation. A little cart, not much more than a wagon, really, was hitched to a goat. In the wagon sat a kid with a stick. Attached to the stick was a length of string, to which was tied a carrot. The kid would dangle the carrot in front of the goat, just out of reach. The goat would step forward to get the carrot, pulling the wagon forward. As the wagon moved, so did the kid and the stick, keeping the carrot tantalizingly3 out of reach of the goat. The goat kept moving to reach the carrot, and thus the cart kept rolling and the kid got a cheap ride.

Now I always thought that was what was meant by “carrot and stick.” But a few years ago the phrase took on a completely different meaning. It now suggests a reward/punishment system of getting things done. When the donkey does what you want, you give him a carrot; when he doesn’t, you hit him with a stick. This is an altogether different, more fundamental, and less creative approach to task management as well as to language usage, and it has the additional disadvantage of having origins not nearly as colorful as those of the “carrot on a stick” example I gave above.

Closer is a word whose meaning hasn’t really been changed, just enhanced—and in a pretty colorful way. There was a time when baseball teams didn’t have “closers,” only relief pitchers. But today, after many decades of evolving baseball practice and strategy, every team has its “closer”—the relief pitcher who comes in during the last inning when the team is ahead, with the task of “closing down” the other side and making sure his team keeps the lead. In addition, thanks in no small part to David Mamet, “closer” also refers to someone who closes deals, especially in the real estate business. “ABC — Always Be Closing!” And don’t bother to take a break, because coffee is for closers. The two uses in this case are about the same: one who gets the job finished.

Out of pocket:  Not so very long ago, the term “out of pocket” referred to expenses incurred by an employee without the benefit of an advance payment or a company credit card. These “out of pocket” expenses were paid by the employee herself, out of her own pocket, in the expectation of being reimbursed later. “I put dinner on the company card, but I’m out of pocket a hundred bucks for the baseball tickets.” Now, however — oddly — “out of pocket” refers not to what I’ve paid but to where I am. You hear “I’ll be out of pocket for the rest of the week,” and you understand it to mean “out of the office,” “out of town,” or generally “unavailable.” Why anyone ever assumed it meant that is beyond me, but today it is the far commoner usage of the term.

Slam dunk: This expression, from basketball, used to mean an easy achievement, something that involved only height and power, not strategy or skill. Today it’s unclear whether a “slam dunk” is an easy shot or a decisive shot or a spectacular shot. From a recent news article: “Kevin Neely, a spokesman for Oregon Attorney General Hardy Myers, called Wednesday’s decision ‘a slam dunk for [Oregon] and certainly a tremendous victory for policymakers in every state.’” The phrase “slam dunk” has come to be used so ambiguously that no one is sure what it means any more.

Short fuse:  Traditionally, a person who was quick to anger was said to have a “short fuse.” The metaphor came from explosives. A firecracker with a long fuse will give you plenty of time from the time you light it until the time you’d better be rid of it. One with a short fuse will explode almost as soon as it’s lighted—hence the reference to a short-tempered person, who “blows up” on slight provocation, as having a “short fuse.” Well, you can forget all that. Today, the term “short fuse” is most commonly used in workplaces to refer to projects that have a fast-approaching deadline and need quick turnaround. “We have a short fuse on this one, so get an associate to come in on Sunday.” The meaning is still a logical one, but the explosive metaphor has been lost, and with it, a lot of color.

Splitting the baby:  The recent evolution of this expression is particularly alarming. In the First Book of Kings, Solomon, son of David, a young judge of no experience, is presented with a problem: two women both claim to be the mother of a particular baby. Neither will relent, so it is up to Solomon to decide which woman gets the baby. His famous solution was to call over a soldier and order him to cut the baby in half and give half to each woman. One woman agrees this is just, while the other woman begs that the baby be spared, even if it means giving the child to the first woman. Solomon stays the soldier’s hand, and gives the baby to the second woman, announcing that she must be the child’s real mother.

Now this kind of evidence would never stand up in a contemporary court of law. The best that can be said of Solomon’s judgment is that it suggests which of the two women might be better at caring for the child; but it does nothing to identify the actual mother. For that, we’d need DNA testing, a benefit Solomon didn’t have.

The point of all this, though, is that “splitting the baby” used to mean suggesting a radical measure as a bluff in order to elicit the true feelings of the persons involved. Today, “splitting the baby” is used as a common synonym for a compromise, or a middle ground that a mediator or arbitrator might find between two parties’ positions. People who use the expression in this way may be unfamiliar with the story; or perhaps they recall it only dimly and believe that Solomon solved the problem by actually cutting the baby in half.4 So an expression that once referred to an outrageous, unthinkable act is now accepted as meaning a reasonable way of being fair to both parties—and no one seems to be troubled by this! Babies don’t have it as good as they used to, evidently.

Robert C. Cumbow is a shareholder with Graham & Dunn, Seattle, where he counsels clients in beverage, food, communications, entertainment, and other businesses on trademark, copyright, advertising, media, and alcoholic beverage law. He teaches at Seattle University Law School and has written extensively on law, film, and language. He acknowledges the contributions of Gary Myles and Stuart Bates to this installment of his quarterly Bar News column on language and usage.

NOTES
1  The first email was sent in October 1971, but none of my usual sources can offer any clear guidance on when the word “email” was first used (though a word spelled the same way but with a very different meaning appears in the Oxford English Dictionary and dates back to 1480).
2  Actually, you would never say “I got three emails.” You would say “I got a hundred and three emails.”
3  See the Greek myth of Tantalus, who offended the gods in a way that would also offend you if I were to mention it here, and who, for his punishment, was condemned to a special place in Hades where, thirsty and hungry, he could see but never quite reach a pool of water and a tree laden with fruit.
4  It’s worth noting here, if only for the sake of completeness, that in Joseph Heller’s God Knows, an anachronistic King David, reflecting back on his life and family with the benefit of both foresight and hindsight, reveals that Solomon was not the vaunted wise judge of legend, but an impetuous halfwit who really thought cutting the baby in half would be a good solution to the problem.