Get it? Got it? Good.

Considering several rationales, including, but not limited to, the lack of funding for grammar school, the need to appeal to consumers who have horrible grammar themselves, or a typographical blunder, I’m putting my money on down-to-earth kitschiness as the reason why H&R Block’s current slogan reads “You Got People.”

Stop me if I’m making things up, but got don’t swing that way. It’s a past-tense form of the verb to get, meaning to acquire, and it’s right at home in sentences like “I got an anatomically correct sculpture for my birthday” and “Crayola chicken pox got me out of detention.”

For the couch-potato linguist who milks his excitement vicariously through grammatical structures, to get is friends with the auxiliary verb to have. There are an infinite number of sentence constructions using the two: “Dylan has gotten more muscular this month,” “Dylan’s gotten nineteen gold medals,” etc.

So, the burning question: If it’s has gotten and have gotten, how come I can say has got and have got, as in “Dylan has got to stop using steroids?”?

Glad you asked. The answer is that you can say whatever you want. No one is are going to stopping you.

Seriously, though, the has got construction may at one point have been passed off as “incorrect usage,” as are most budding grammatical constructions and turns of phrase. In most cases, though, it’s just a matter of English changing to adapt to (and to adopt) a new way of saying something. Remember the nineteenth century? Probably not. I’ll fill you in: people said “Have you this?” and “Have you that?” Got wasn’t yet at center stage — back then it was only a groupie. But now, we’re inclined towards turns of phrase like “Got a cigarette?” and “Got Milk?,” in which got wholly replaces have, even though got is traditionally the past-tense form of to get, and not an infinitive. Am I confusing you yet?

It seems that phrases like “Got Milk?” are shorter forms of phrases like “Have You Got Milk?,” but because in the former the auxiliary verb is nowhere to be found, and also because of the overly prim and proper, almost wholesomely Amish connotation of “Have You Got Milk?” on a billboard, I’ll leave this one alone.

So, back to the starting line: Why does a gigantic corporation like H&R Block, which obviously has the budget for a plethora of top-notch marketing executives, screw up the grammar in their slogan? “You’ve Got People” sounds good enough to me — though as you may have noticed from this article, I’m a grammar Nazi, and it very well may be that “You Got People” sounds “good enough” to the average layperson. I’ll admit that “You Have People” sounds like less of a corporate slogan and more of a cross stitch pattern you’d find in your mother’s kitchen. But come on, H&R — I know you went to accounting school, but surely you know about auxiliary verbs?

While I’m at it, I’ll share the new Domino’s advertising campaign slogan with you: “You Got 30 Minutes.” (Which, by the way, is a scam of a campaign that focuses not on 30-minute delivery, but the “gift” of free time to their consumers.)

You be the judge. If you speak English, you have a minuscule influence on the way our language develops. It’s the speakers, not some committee of cantankerous grammar grouches, that shape the language.

But maybe it’s sticklers like me who complain about the language that keep it from evolving too quickly.