You got to

And there's always that one who wears their suspenders a little too tightly. I had a friend who always wanted to set examples out of people -- no matter how close they were. She was stuck in "I've-got-to-be-professional-and-do-my-job" mode. What a tool.

 

never change a quote.

End. Of. Thread.

If he says "We ain't got no business losing to these punks." you "GONNA" change that. Hell. Freak. No.

That's "GONNA" be my lede.

If I'm not "GONNA" change that English, I'm not going to change "GONNA".

I want to put people in the mindset that they are standing beside the person that I'm interviewing. I want to paint a vivid picture. I don't give 2girls1cup if I ever win another award. I've got way more than any professor ever said I would have won at 31 years old.

(CAN YOU TELL I'M DRUNK?)

 

I've seen "gotta" in copy this week... and NOT in a quote. Yikes.

 

Irks me to no end that the word "got" is even in the equation.
It shouldn't be.
"You have to ..." instead of "You have got to ..."
If someone says the latter, I'll quote it. But I hate to.
I never, never use the word "got" in such instances.
Others, however, do.

 

I'm fine with you gotta, you've gotta, you've got to or you have to. And, if it has to be this way, you have got to. But AP changes "you gotta" to "you got to" on a fairly regular basis. No one speaks that way.

And I'm not one to go against AP, but if 99 percent of the public says gotta and gonna on a regular basis, from congressmen down to janitors, it ain't regional dialect.

 

... kiss an angel good morning ...

(Sorry, thought this might be a Charley Pride thread. Carry on.)

 

Sounds like the head of RAs at my IOHL (who was a close friend of one of my close friends) . . . caught me with my cat in my on-campus apartment and made me take it home or get booted out of housing.

Come to find out later, my buddy tells me she is living on campus with three f'n cats. I wanted to smack her around a little. All she said was she was sorry, but she had to do it to stress her authority over all of us.

 

I don't trust anyone with more than two cats as a general rule.

 

aybe I'm a bad copy editor, but I leave gotta and gonna in quotes. It's a part of who the person is and the meaning of the quote.

Imagine how it would have looked in 1973 if newspapers had changed Tug McGraw's rallying cry from "Ya gotta believe!" to "You got to believe"

 

Jeff Francouer said this after a 15-1 pounding the Mets put on the Braves earlier last season: "If you're gonna get beat, you might as well get the snot knocked out of you."

I don't like to run gonna and gotta, but in that case, where the message or quote just rolls off the tongue and shows you the emotion, I think they're good to use.