{"id":1958,"date":"2019-11-19T18:11:41","date_gmt":"2019-11-20T00:11:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/?p=1958"},"modified":"2021-03-10T11:22:18","modified_gmt":"2021-03-10T17:22:18","slug":"misbegotten-views-on-gotten","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/effective-writing\/misbegotten-views-on-gotten\/","title":{"rendered":"Misbegotten Views on Gotten<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"

A few of you were dismayed by our using\u00a0gotten<\/em>\u00a0in our article The Lowdown on Different Than<\/em><\/a>. We wrote: “In recent years we have debunked some of these baseless ‘rules,’ and gotten a lot of heat from frustrated readers.”<\/p>\n

An exasperated gentleman from Australia was “shocked” by the appearance of “gotten,” which he denounced\u00a0ex cathedra<\/em>\u00a0as a “non-word.” His email was generous with vitriol but stingy with evidence. That’s because no language scholar in any English-speaking country would question the legitimacy of\u00a0gotten<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Gotten\u00a0<\/em>has been in continuous use for about seven hundred years, though it all but disappeared from England in the eighteenth century. “In Great Britain\u00a0got<\/em>\u00a0is the only form of the participle used and the older form\u00a0gotten<\/em>\u00a0is considered archaic,” says Bergen and Cornelia Evans’s\u00a0Dictionary of Contemporary American Usage<\/em>. “In the United States\u00a0gotten<\/em>\u00a0is still the preferred form of the participle when it is used with\u00a0have<\/em>\u00a0to express a completed action.”<\/p>\n

The BBC’s website recently ranked\u00a0gotten<\/em>\u00a0fifteenth on a list of the fifty most annoying “Americanisms.” The\u00a0Grammarist<\/em>\u00a0website explains: “Many English speakers from outside North America resist the encroachment of so-called Americanisms (many of which, like\u00a0gotten<\/em>, are not actually American in origin) on their versions of English, and, for mysterious reasons, some feel especially strongly about\u00a0gotten<\/em>.”<\/p>\n

In\u00a0The Careful Writer<\/em>, the American writer-editor Theodore M. Bernstein admits to some reservations about the use of\u00a0gotten<\/em>: “Have gotten<\/em>\u00a0might occasionally be useful in written language \u2026 In most instances, however, a more precise verb would be used: ‘He has gotten [received] his just deserts’; ‘He has gotten [obtained] what he was after’ \u2026”<\/p>\n

Roy H. Copperud’s\u00a0Dictionary of Usage and Style<\/em>\u00a0has no such misgivings: “An uneasy idea persists that\u00a0gotten<\/em>\u00a0is improper \u2026 Efforts to avoid\u00a0got<\/em>\u00a0by substituting\u00a0obtained<\/em>\u00a0or any other word the writer must strain after are misspent.”<\/p>\n

The American linguists Patricia T. O’Conner and Stewart Kellerman offer a further vindication of\u00a0gotten<\/em>: “A Brit will tell you that ‘gotten’ is wrong. Not so! The truth is that at one time, English routinely had two past participles for the verb ‘get.’ \u2026 While American English retained both forms, British English dropped ‘gotten’ entirely. The result is that we have a nuance of meaning the poor Britons don’t.<\/p>\n

“When we say, ‘Jack and Sue have got a dog,’ we mean they own a dog. When we say, ‘Jack and Sue have gotten a dog,’ we mean they have acquired one. There’s a distinct difference between the two statements.”<\/p>\n

This article is a classic from our late writer-editor Tom Stern, first published on July 1, 2015.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A few of you were dismayed by our using\u00a0gotten\u00a0in our article The Lowdown on Different Than. We wrote: “In recent years we have debunked some of these baseless ‘rules,’ and gotten a lot of heat from frustrated readers.” An exasperated gentleman from Australia was “shocked” by the appearance of “gotten,” which he denounced\u00a0ex cathedra\u00a0as a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1958","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-effective-writing","category-verbs"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1958"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1958"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1958\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1958"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1958"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1958"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}