My ID got inactive or inactivated?

Question

I am trying to understand -- after got, should the verb be in past tense?

Example:

• got done or did
• got shift or shifted
• got move or moved
• I got confuse or confused

Please help me. Thanks in advance. 🙂

Answer 1

I would say "My ID was deactivated" (or "My ID got deactivated") if it was a deliberate act on the part of security personnel. It may also suggest that it will be impossible (you left the company) or difficult (you did something bad) to get it reactivated.

"My ID became/went inactive" suggests that you did not use it for a while or complete some of the regular required steps to keep it active, and the system automatically made your card inactive, prompting you to do some needed updates (e.g., new information, or just a yearly check-in to confirm your details, as I have to do with my library card, even though I use it every week).

To answer your more general question - use:
It got done / shifted / moved / confused
never It got did / shift / move / confuse

Answer 2

When you use get like this, you are talking about something that happened to something: it's a kind of passive voice sentence.

I need to activate my credit card - active voice
My credit card needs to be activated - passive voice
My credit card was activated - passive voice, past
My credit card got activated - passive voice, past

In passive voice sentences, whether using was or got, we use the past participle, which ends with -ed.

Not all get sentences are passive voice: there are a few phrasal verbs that relate to actively doing something, for example get ready.

If we are talking about the state of something now or in the past, we use an adjective:

My credit card is active - present
My credit card was active - past

It's a little bit confusing, because past participles are a kind of adjective and we can use some of them in state sentences, so we can say

My card is damaged

We only do this when there is no corresponding adjective... in this case, there is no adjective damage- only a verb or a noun. We would not, however, use activated, because we can use the adjective form active.

So, we can use past participles in is sentences is there is no equivalent regular adjective, but we cannot ever use a regular adjective in a passive-voice type get sentence.

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Note that, for a security ID, we would normally say deactivated rather than inactivated.