Buzzard

[quote user="nomoss"][quote user="richard51"]Give the guy a break - read his previous posts. His dad lives in France, not him. Yep life can be made very complicated.[/quote] Maybe she/he thinks Cologne is in France?[/quote] There's quite a lot of cologne in France. Other scents also exist.

[quote user="chrisell"]...... Every wet plasterer is British I will admit .....[/quote] An excellent plasterer where I live is Dutch, and he has expat Dutch as well as French clients. Not everyone is a Brit.

I think my primary school teachers thought it was a word to be avoided, because "it was an ugly word". Which is a funny objection, when you think about it. There's nothing wrong with "cot" or "lot", for example, and there are a large number of phrasal verbs like "get up", "get off", "get out", "get going" etc, which would find they were missing an important past tense.

I'm not quite a centenarian but I was taught NEVER to use the word "got" at all, ever, by my primary school teachers (in 1950s Forest Hill, south London - I doubt whether very many of them had much Latin). It was only later that I came to understand that this is a very English prejudice against a useful word, and one that makes almost no sense at all to most writers in the United States. It's highly likely that English teachers in France will have studied material from the US either instead of, or as well as, from England. So to answer the OP's original question, in my view it was wrong to "correct" the French teacher's use of "got", as it isn't wrong.

[quote user="nomoss"] He only wrote those words to make them fit the rythm with which he was so firmly stuck. [/quote] I don't think so. Here's a bit of Hamlet, and it's not verse, and what's more Horatio is reading out a written letter: Horatio. [Reads.] 'Horatio, when thou shalt have overlooked this, give these fellows some means to the king: they have letters for him. Ere we were two days old at sea, a pirate of very warlike appointment gave us chase. Finding ourselves too slow of sail, we put on a compelled valour, and in the grapple I boarded them: on the instant they got clear of our ship; so I alone became their prisoner. Sorry about all the messy formatting - can someone tell me how to edit it out?

There was this chap called Shakespeare wrote a piece about some lovers: Paris. Poor soul, thy face is much abus'd with tears. Juliet. The tears have got small victory by that, For it was bad enough before their spite. Good enough for him.