grammaticalityidiomsinfinitives
The following sentence is from a mathematical lecture note here:
It takes a little bit of getting used to the idea of a function that cannot actually be evaluated at any specific point, but with some practice you will find that it will not cause any significant conceptual difficulty.
Is there anything wrong with this sentence? I guess it is supposed to be "It takes a little bit of time for getting used to the idea…". Any idea for understanding the sentence?
One would use tad when one wanted to make the expression a bit more folksy than "bit" or "little" would come across. NOAD says this about the etymology:
ORIGIN late 19th cent. (denoting a small child): origin uncertain, perhaps from tadpole . The current usage dates from the 1940
If you were writing formally you would probably use one of the other expressions. But it is certainly fair game for sports or political diatribes.
Note: In your example Getting is not the auxiliary verb. The auxiliary verb is to be --> "are getting", while getting is the main verb, and divorce is a noun.
Edit: psmears, PLL and also Robusto made me doubt about my results eheh, so I re-checked everything and edited my answer.
First, I searched "they are getting a divorce", "they are divorcing" and "they are getting divorced".
Then I searched "my parents are getting a divorce", "my parents are divorcing" and "my parents are getting divorced"
The Google search gives results in contrast though:
My proposal was not the best one in the end, so you can choose between the others two, I apologise for the previous misinformation.
The sentence "my parents is going to divorce" is wrong, because "parents" is plural, therefore it requires a plural verb: "My parents are going to divorce", which is perfectly acceptable under the grammatical point of view.
Best Answer
To get used to something is the act of becoming accustomed or habituated to something. The last entry in an englishgrammarsecrets page about used to says: "We use 'to get used to doing' to talk about the process of something becoming normal for us."
The sentence you ask about says one must get used to some idea about a function, and quantifies how much of the "getting used to" activity is needed, as "a little bit". The grammar is ok, if slightly colloquial.