get had

Victor Steinbok aardvark66 at GMAIL.COM
Wed Feb 2 04:03:53 UTC 2011


My sheltered existence means that I too often get surprised by pervasive
expressions that I might not normally pay attention to if I were more
exposed to them.

One came from Rachel Maddow's tweet last night, and don't you all yell
at me at once that everyone is familiar with this:

> The bad news about a free and open internet? Sometimes you get had by
> brilliant satirists.

"been had" gets 2 and a quarter mil raw ghits.
"being had" oddly crosses the 3 mil threshold (including Dilbert,
EnglishForums.com, bloggerheads).
But "get had" gets a none-too-shabby 295K. Some are spurious (e.g., when
"get had" is actually "get/had"), but many are not, especially in the
beginning of the Google list.

http://goo.gl/Pdhrr
> "We were had," wrote Lloyd Grove in The Washington Post. "We fell
> hook, line and sinker for Maryland Gov. Parris Glendening's April
> Fools' joke about him and his new wife, former top staffer Jennifer
> Crawford, expecting twins on Aug. 18."

     VS-)

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org



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