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orthography - "Geteth the tax"?


I was driving today, and I saw this billboard:



The tax man cometh. Geteth the health insurance.



Is this spelling correct? I'm not used to -eth, so I am not sure. Should it be "getteth"?



Answer



If we are looking for historical correctness, then this phrase isn't even correct, because "get the health insurance" is an imperative sentence and the imperative form of get was get in Early Modern English. So the accurate sentence would be "get the health insurance".


However, if you want to know whether the form for the 3rd person singular is geteth or getteth, then we run into another problem; spelling was not completely standardized when these suffixes were used, so there is probably record of both used. However, one of the major standards-setters in the English language was the King James version of the Bible, published in 1611. In my corpus of the King James bible, the spelling getteth is used 9 times, and forgetteth is used 4 times. No single-t spelling is used. Further, in the 2nd person singular forms, we see begettest (2x) and forgettest (2x), and no single-t versions.


So, this might be the closest thing to an authoritative answer to how this word should be spelled.


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