Talk:getting used to

From Wiktionary, the free dictionary
Jump to navigation Jump to search

The following information passed a request for deletion.

This discussion is no longer live and is left here as an archive. Please do not modify this conversation, but feel free to discuss its conclusions.

getting used to — This comment was unsigned.

It's certainly strange having this as a noun: look at the example sentence, and compare "this world record will take some beating". Equinox ◑ 22:00, 22 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Consider the following examples:
  1. Getting used to that was slow and painful.
  2. That took some slow and painful getting used to.
  3. The Frankish race […] were slowly and painfully getting used to all these changes.
  4. All this takes some painful getting used to.
I think these are patterns that all gerunds can follow, in order of decreasing frequency. Try substituting "walking (home)".
OTOH, one cannot insert an adverb, adjective or pronoun between getting and used to with no following nominal. I think this might be a set phrase when it does not have an explicit following object. DCDuring TALK 23:29, 22 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I think there are two parts to this: the phrase "take getting used to", and the simple gerund phrases. The first can have modifiers such as "some", "much", "a lot of", "quite a bit of", "no", "very little", etc. It also can have "accustomed to" substituted for "used to", but, aside from this snowclone-ish quality seems at least a bit idiomatic. The other is pretty solidly SOP: "I was awaiting his getting used to the idea" / "I was waiting for him to get used to the idea'", "getting used to the new user interface needs to be a high priority" / It needs to be a high priority to get used to the new user interface" are examples of how one nominalized verb construction can be substituted easily for the other. In addition, you can substitute just about any other synonym for this sense of "used to": not just "accustomed to", but "inured to", "habituated to", "comfortable with", etc. Chuck Entz (talk) 01:21, 23 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I think we agree that it is only the form without an explicit following object that could be idiomatic. The grammar is odd which supports idiomaticity.
  1. "P takes/needs (X) getting used to (P)."
  2. "P needs (for) X to get used to P."
  3. "P takes/needs being got(ten) used to (by X)."
  4. "P needs to be be got(ten) used to (by X)."
  5. "X needs to get used to P."
What's odd to me is "getting used to" instead of "being got(ten) used to". DCDuring TALK 02:18, 23 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Delete, easy. Mglovesfun (talk) 09:56, 23 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • @Ruakh: I don't think you are giving his examples enough credit. To me they suggest that I was mesmerized by the interaction of get and used to and the missing complement to used to in this headword. get used to is somewhat idiomatic. It appears in some translating dictionaries. Obviously it needs to appear in the lexicon of my idiolect as I couldn't analyze it properly. DCDuring TALK 13:29, 23 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Well, if his examples deserve any credit at all, then you're right that I'm not giving them enough. "It takes some getting used to" is clearly grammatical and gets tens of thousands of b.g.c. hits, whereas IMHO his examples are all ungrammatical, or at least very questionable, and none of them gets more than 20 b.g.c. hits, so clearly MHO is not alone. —RuakhTALK 17:19, 23 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]
How about "needs some more thinking"? That gets 100,000s of hits. Equinox ◑ 17:22, 23 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]
"Thinking", of course, is a straightforward gerund. We can also say, "I need to think some more." We can't say *"I need to get used to some more." —RuakhTALK 19:53, 23 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I suspect that your position could bear some thinking over or your reading some catching up. It is not hard to find contemporary examples in fictional dialog that fit with my perception that these constructions are becoming acceptable. DCDuring TALK 20:32, 23 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]
If "these constructions are becoming acceptable" but there was a time when "getting used to" was the only acceptable construction of its kind, might the "in a jiffy" rule apply? - -sche (discuss) 22:09, 23 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Every new construction has a prototype. How long an interval between the attestation of the first and the second, third and fourth etc do we need. I'd love to see the research in the discussion. DCDuring TALK 23:50, 23 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Keep. I have also created get used, to me the formatting is OK but feel free to change the definition and formatting. --Anatoli (обсудить/вклад) 05:09, 25 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Whether we keep or not get used is a positively misleading headword. Used to is an idiom in itself.
Almost all English linguists's grammars since the 1930s note the use of get as a passive marker, which passiveness is what mesmerized me. Actually clicking through the four apparent lemmings at “get used”, in OneLook Dictionary Search. shows that there are no OneLook references that have this and they don't even have a coherent redirect. In contrast, “used to”, in OneLook Dictionary Search. has numerous lemmings. DCDuring TALK 13:18, 25 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not sure it matters either way, but — I don't think this is the eventive-passive use of "get" ("get killed" ≈ "be killed"). Rather, I think it's the inchoative use ("get angry" ≈ "become angry"). The two uses are related, of course. —RuakhTALK 15:15, 25 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Yes. I am still trying to understand this fully. I simply didn't realize that get had the essentially grammatical role of forming passives. In that role, it is indistinguishable in many cases where it is used with an "-ed" form from the "become" sense. This is apparently identical to the ambiguity in such cases between "be" as copula and "be" as former of passives. DCDuring TALK 16:51, 25 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]
In this case (eg. I will get used to it) "to get" means "to become", not "to be" (eg. This program gets used a lot.). Still, I think "to get used to" is very idiomatic. Not sure if the entry should include "to" but the term and its usage is not intuitive to many foreign language speakers. --Anatoli (обсудить/вклад) 00:28, 27 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I've looking at a few grammar books of various vintages about this. The problem is that the grammar of (deprecated template usage) get, (deprecated template usage) get and (deprecated template usage) used to are all a bit sticky in themselves. To lexicalize this expression (deprecated template usage) getting used to and/or (deprecated template usage) get used to misses the underlying subtleties of the constituents in the wide variety of uses in which they occur.
I wonder whether we should have an appendix of the ways in which English expresses conceptual tense and aspect, which can be through inflection, modal verbs, modal adverbs, and periphrasis using lexical verbs and temporal adverbials. Each language has its own combinations of ways of doing this. DCDuring TALK 01:03, 27 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I don't know if it has to be so complicated. Is it just to fend off the deletionists? I don't know if there is a 100% argument (apart from "coalmine") to keep entries that have a space in the middle. --Anatoli (обсудить/вклад) 02:17, 27 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]


Retrieved from "https://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:getting_used_to&oldid=31619708"