You’re gonna get it!
Why bother postering a large part of Amsterdam West with Dunglish? Most of the staff at Kinko’s, the photocopy and printing shop, speak English and are foreigners. They could have helped. Or maybe they didn’t want to, which wouldn’t surprised me.
So, you’re getting 30:
30 lashes with a wet noodle
30 kicks in the ass
30 euro
30 beers
30 bicycles
30 sandwiches
30 I love you’s
Got 30?
September 7th, 2005 at 5:00 pm
I’m afraid Timo has been a very bad boy:
http://www.google.nl/search?q=%22gets+30%22
September 15th, 2005 at 1:13 am
I’ve heard of “getting some”, so I guess “getting 30” is really good. Timo got lucky!
October 7th, 2005 at 11:55 am
Shouldn’t it be 30 euroS ??
October 7th, 2005 at 1:08 pm
Nope! According to the rules of the European Union, which I was bombarded with in 2002, euro is both plural and singular, and does not take an ‘s’. Many people, myself included, find this silly, but officially, euro is both plural and singular.
October 25th, 2005 at 1:13 pm
Correct. Euro is a so-called uncountable. I actually love uncountables, but that’s just me. I’m even fairly certain that every currency is an uncountable.
Anyways. The “getting 30” problem is actually not a really horrible mistake, although a mistake it clearly is. You can say: “I’m getting old” and even “I’m getting 30 years old”. Which also doesn’t have a noun as its object, does it? Had I paid attention during grammar lectures and remembered more of them, I might be able to draw some sort of tree-structure of this sentence. Who knows, we might find some deletion or ellipsis rule which governs all of this. However, getting thirty is a mistake, but it fits in well with the “getting old”, which makes it an understandable mistake. An who knowd, Timo might love Reini because she’s not perfect.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m getting tired and some coffee 😉
January 31st, 2007 at 8:09 pm
The plural of Euro should be decided by the grammar of the language being used. The EU has no right 🙂 Latvia recently challenged the spelling of Euro because “eu” is an unknown diphthong in the language. They wanted to spell it “eiro”, short for Eiropa, the Latvian word for “Europe”. And that makes perfect sense to me.