Americanisms

[skillsandtea]

Gotten. Is that even a word? I'm reading Gone Girl at the moment and 'gotten' keeps coming up. I thought it was slang but now I see it in proper text. It's really grating me.

It's an old word that we dropped and they kept, isn't it?

It's legitimate American English. Clayhead's right that it's a form of the verb that we stopped using and they didn't.

"Forgotten" is used in British English, though, which has the same root word. We Yanks just kept the "ten" for both.

'Can I get a ? ' drives me mad, as in 'Can I get a coffee/vodka and tonic?' - don't even get me started on the 'vodka-tonic' craze...It's so tiring saying 'and'.
I feel that the correct response should be:
'No. Not until you learn to speak correctly.'
Bah!!!

The only thing that one can quibble with grammatically in "can I get" is the use of "can" rather than "may." The definition of "get" is "to come to have or hold (something); receive". So "can I get" is as correct as "can I have," although the pedant in me would prefer "may." "Get" does not have some sort of built-in reflexive as so many posters on MN seem to think.

'May I get?' is fine with me. 'Can I get?' is not. It's the 'Can' that grates.

Ok, then I agree, and sorry for misinterpreting.

We love 'juice box' so much better than the English 'carton of juice'.
Unfortunately, I think starting every sentence with 'so' is sadly creeping in here.

Can I get= informal
Could I get= more formal
May/Might I get= very formal
Would you mind awfully if I got=very very formal

All perfectly OK. May/Might are falling out of use though, so "could" is really becoming the default "asking for something politely" verb.

I thought 'Can I get...?' was used in Scotland as well.

I tend to assume that a lot of supposed Americanisms are archaic or dialect usages that just don't feature in standard British English.