Go and get across

Question

I'm a teacher of English in Argentina. I'm currently teaching students in a large cement company. One of mine asked me weather there's any difference between go across and get across. I just said no, but then started to doubt.. I s there an? Please let me know.

Usenet · Accepted Answer

[nq:1]I'm a teacher of English in Argentina. I'm currently teaching students in a large cement company. One of mine asked ... and get across. I just said no, but then started to doubt.. I s there an? Please let me know.[/nq]
It's usually better to ask question like this with example sentences at the very least, but a larger context is even more helpful.

I'd say that in most cases of formal English, "go across" and "get across" are not used. They are replaced by "cross", as in: "In order to avoid having to hike another 50 miles, the explorers decided to cross the river at it's narrowest point". Here, I think "cross could be replaced by "go across" in very informal spoken English, but not by "get across."
If you have to travel from the far west side of town to the far east side of town to buy some special, then you'd say something like, "But if you want some really fresh wet mozzarella, you have go across town to the Italian section." "Get across" wouldn't work here.

You can say "I have to get across town town as quickly as possible. What's the best way?" "Go across" might work, but it doesn't feel right to me. "Get across", which means "travel across", which means, simply, "cross", sounds more natural.

Franke: EFL teacher & medical editor
Native speaker of American English
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Usenet · Answer

[nq:1]I'm a teacher of English in Argentina. I'm currently teaching students in a large cement company. One of mine asked ... and get across. I just said no, but then started to doubt.. I s there an? Please let me know.[/nq]
Well, as Franke says, examples would help. But if you're using these phrasals figuratively, they mean different things -

'Be received': 'the egg and bacon ice cream didn't go across to well at her dinner party';
or
'Be understood': "some days I just can't get across my ideas to my students".
Compare 'get through to someone'.
DC Cat

Usenet · Answer

For starters, if you are using 'go across' or 'get across' to mean 'movement across something', then people will understand what you MEAN with either, even if your English sounds strange. As for the more technical difference between the two:
I think it's more the difference between 'go' meaning neutral movement, and 'get' meaning 'going somewhere with effort'. I had a look at the British National Corpus to check. The Corpus is a very large collection of English writing and speech that we can search to see examples of how English is used. It's useful to see what people 'go across' and 'get across' (with the meaning 'movement'):
'go across' + the road, the street, the river, to the shops, the sky, the fields ... (the road/street is the most common)

'get across' + the river, the border, the narrow neck of ..., the Channel, the mountains, to Europe, the gully, the road, ...

It seems from this that if you are talking about movement, you 'go across' if you simply move, but you 'get across' if you want to show some effort involved in the moving. For instance, these sentences might sound strange to some people:
- Look at that interesting man. Let's ??get across?? and talk to him. ('go across' sounds more natural here. From the context, the man doesn't sound very difficult to reach.)
- It took us fourteen days to ??go across?? the mountains. ('get across' sounds more natural here: if they're mountains, and it took fourteen days, it was probably difficult.)
- A woman was standing at the corner, trying to ??go across?? the busy road. ('get across', or just 'cross' would seem more natural here.)
However, by far the most common meaning of 'get across' is the figurative one: get a message across, get an image across, get across a fact, etc.
Does this help?
Jan
PS You can find the British National Corpus at http://view.byu.edu/.

Go and get across

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