A friend of mine insists that you can 'catch a scare', but I've only ever heard 'get a scare'. I googled the expression and mostly got 'catch a scare card' or 'catch a scare crow', with only one instance where 'cops get a scare from an incident'.
So is 'catch a scare' acceptable as correct British English or correct American English?
Best Answer
There certainly are figurative usages involving catch. For example,...
But there are only two relevant instances of caught a scare in the entire Google Books corpus (and one of those is just wordplay against one has caught measles). I would say it's just an exceptionally rare case of OP's friend (mistakenly?) trying to use the format in contexts where no-one else does.