'Gotten'

[JollyGiraffe]

WHY has this awful word made its way over here from?!

Past participle of 'to get' is 'got'!!!

I'm not a huge fan of the 'I'm loving...' trend (as in 'I'm loving Strictly this year', 'I'm loving flared sleeves that are fashionable at the moment', apparently that's an Indian English thing albeit they consider it poor grammar for someone's whose English needs improvement*

*according to our tour guide when we went a few years ago anyway

For example, I like to read filthy smut stories where Harry and Draco are in a relationship but I'm unlikely to find that in any possible sequels from JK Rowling

I once read the most filth laden story about Felicity from Malory Towers having a go with Julian from Famous Five while his wife Sally (also of MT fame, Felicity's older sister's best pal) watched

Yesterday..

"would you like a cup of tea work colleague?"

'I'm good thanks'

😫😫😫

"Gotten" is NOT an Americanism.

Did you know that Shakespeare used it? (See Richard III)

And Alexander Pope?

And it never quite went OUT of usage in the UK.

I dislike 'gotten', 'can I', 'I'm out' and a thousand other contemporary US usages when used unconsciously in the UK. 'Uni' and 'no worries' are two Australianisms that make my teeth itch too.

I dislike them because they erode our regional diversity and we lose both the richness of regional speech and (often but not always) actually lose the power to distinguish different thoughts through expression.

That said, as has been said above some are re-imported; some never left these isles and English has never stopped evolving nor adopting foreign words, thereby making it the largest language by far del mundo (the second - Russian or French: I forget now - being about half the size).

Finally, in extremis there is a problem with this use: I work in child protection and over the last ten years have noticed more children coming to the attention of social services who speak American English because they are basically not being parented and spend all their time watching screens. Tis very sad to see.

Gotten’ is, in fact, an English word that was in use in England at the time America was colonized by the English. It is found in the King James version of the Bible, and maybe even because of that, over the centuries, the Americans kept on using it and the English did not.

Origin: 1150-1200(v.) Middle English geten < Old Norse geta to obtain, beget; cognate with Old English –gietan (> Middle English yeten), German-gessen, in vergessen to forget; (noun) Middle English: something gotten, offspring, derivative of the v. dictionary.reference.com/browse/gotten