David Gets to Gettin'

When I first got to Germany, I kept thinking in English, translating my thoughts to German, and then retranslating them back to English because my host parents understood English anyways and there was remarkably little point translating it to German in the first place. Although this thought process didn't necessarily improve my German, it did direct me to one of the extreme peculiarities of the English language: the word "get." We use it all the damn time, and there's no single word in German that's nearly as versatile. Some variant of the verb "to get" can be used in just about every situation. For instance, here's an excerpt from someone's diary I just made up:

I just don't get it. Every time I get chili and cheese on my hot dogs, I get sick. Last night I got some, and I get a massive stomachache. I get onto the bathroom floor because its the only place I can get comfortable. Suddenly I get a phone call, but I've got no idea where my goddamn phone has gotten off to. I'm trying to get to it, but I have to get the strength to get off of the floor first. I get my arms underneath me, and I start to get my mosey on down the hallway. I'm getting all up and against the walls, the pictures are getting knocked off the wall, and I'm getting hit by the falling frames. The ones that don't get me are getting smashed to pieces as they get to the floor. Finally I get my bearings, and when I get to the living room I get a sense of the epicenter of the ringing. Eventually, after I get all the cushions off of every chair and sofa, I get to the phone, having gotten tired and downright exhausted from the search. Of course by the time I've gotten to the phone, the phone's gotten done ringing. I've got an awful feeling in my stomach now because I had to get off the bathroom floor and get up and about, but I try to get back to the caller anyway. Unfortunately, the phone won't get reception anymore because it had just gotten covered in chili cheese dog.  

That's 14 sentences and 35 forms of "get". How is that possible? Well, let's analyze this further. Keep in mind I've been thinking of this word for 5 months, so we can use some examples. Here's just using plain old "to get":

He'll get bigger.
He gets mugged often.
Did you get the book I sent?
I'll get the ball.
Get me a car.
Cars get my dog all riled up.
I couldn't get him to talk.
I get to sleep all day on Wednesdays.
I don't get Heidegger.

Here we have it meaning, in order:

• become
• is (passive voice)
• receive
• retrieve
• give
• make
• convince
• am allowed to, &
• understand.

We have a single word that can be used 9 times without two sentences using it the same way. In German, you would have to use at least 8 different words to say these sentences (the conjugated forms of: werden for the first two, bekommen/kriegen, holen, geben, machen, überzeugen, dürfen, & verstehen, respectively). It even takes over the standard "to be" in the passive voice. That's right: the English language has two different verb forms of the passive voice. DOES THIS BOTHER NO ONE ELSE??? I can only assume this differentiation occurs because we would rather "get" something done to us than just "be" there while it happens. If you "are punched," you just sat there like a little bitch and took it. If you "get punched," you earned that badboy.

i.e., "Snooki got punched."

"Get" gets even more batshit when you start adding prepositions to it. For instance:

Get oneself/something [up (to)/down (to)/in(to)/out (of)/on(to)/off (of)/back to/back from/behind/in front of/around/past/beyond/by/to/ next to/over/under/between/through/away from] some undefined object.
I didn't get to raking the lawn today.
We should get together more often.
I don't get out much.
He can get by without your help.
They don't really get along.
Get up, Jim, it's almost noon.
I need to get up the courage before I talk to my boss.
Get over here.
Get over him, Patricia.
The Broncos front four needs to get after the quarterback more.
He can't seem to get around the law.
I'll get back by 6 tonight.
Get away from that infant, grandma!
O.J. can get away with murder.
I get off work at 5.
Feet get me off.
Get with the program.
I can get behind that.
I wanna know if you can get to that.
Get at me, bra.
Get down with your bad self. 
Let me get my pants on first.
Let me get my pizza on first.

In order, these mean:

• move oneself/something in the general direction stated in relation to some undefined object
• have the opportunity of
• meet up
• leave the home
• survive
• agree
• wake up
• gather
• come
• stop dwelling on
• chase
• circumvent
• return
• escape, when one considers the dangers of infants
• evade punishment for
• finish
• arouse
• join
• support
• wrap one's mind around
• respond to
• boogie
• put on, &
• nothing. This sentence means nothing.

And if someone knows what in the Christ that means, by all means.

There's 24 more uses (25, if you count Mr. Smith's babblings).

In fact, we like the word "get" so much, we even invented a verb construct just to get it some more air time in the term "have got." As in, "I have got way to much time to think about the English language." The entire thing makes absolutely no sense, and it appears nowhere else in English. It's not the past participle of "get." That's "have gotten" (at least in American English, which is the only English that counts in All the Wile's book), as in, "I have gotten chlamydia." This construct contrasts with "I have got chlamydia." The first means you have received or contracted the disease, likely (unless you went out looking for it) from someone, i.e., "I have gotten chlamydia from your sister." That construction doesn't work with "I've got," because "I've got" literally just means "I have," in this case in the sense of "to possess." We could only grammatically say, "I've got chlamydia. It's from your sister." Which means we've just taken a word we already have, "have," and stuck another word onto it, "got," to mean what we already had in the first place. We've made a verb as simple as "to have" into a two-word phrase that takes more time to say solely because we have an absolute woodstockian lovefest going with the word "get."

Gross.

But English speakers don't have time to be wasted on silly things like saying two words to mean something for which we already have a single, monosyllabic word. We have no problem dropping one of the two words, so sometimes that means we drop the one we're trying to say in the first place: the "have." We'll throw "have" under the bus because, for some reason deeply embedded within the English-speaker's psyche, we fucking love the word "got." When we could grammatically say either "I have to go to the store" or "I've got to go to the store," we could just as well colloquially say, "Yo homeskillet, I got to go to the store real quick, bruh. Talkin' 'bout groceries, dawg. Groceries." This sentence makes perfect sense to everybody.

Especially K-Fed.

Even more intriguing is the fact that "I got to go to the store" already means something: I was allowed to go to the store, maybe by my mother, or once the school within 500 feet of it finally shut down. Sure, context exists and it would be admittedly difficult to screw that one up, but regardless: we have chosen the possibility for linguistic ambiguity over just goddamn using the word "have." The next time someone signs off of Facebook or G-Chat with a friendly "g2g," you, O enlightened reader, now can wisely and helpfully respond to them, "I congratulate you regarding your newfound liberties, good sir or madam, but what precisely, may I ask, was heretofore preventing your departure?" Check. And. Mate.
We assume you have no interest in the friendship continuing after this conversation.

This word is what I thought of every single day for 5 months in Europe. Every single one. Invariably at some point, my thought process would turn to how I was always having to find synonyms for this word that apparently means everything, and thinking of all its uses, listing them day in and day out. In fact, if you were having a conversation with me while I was in Germany, there was about a 50% chance I was just listening to how often and in what contexts you used the word "get," having slight semi-subconscious mind-gasms every time I found a new one. I would constantly stress myself out over the multiple uses of this word, thinking of how ridiculous it would be to be a foreigner learning a word with at least 33 different meanings.

This poster makes remarkably little sense to non-English speakers.

This is what I do. This is my life, this is my thought process, and this post is my cry for help.