Got vs Gotten

I knew someone would call me out on this. And sure enough, commenting on this post, faithful reader Sam G writes:

First paragraph: "gotten"? O tempora, O Mores indeed.

To which I say: hooey. To begin with, there's much to be said for the vigour of American English. Plus, as you know, gotten is merely an ancient form that, though out of fashion in the old country, was preserved in the new world. As is so often the case, we turn to the Sage of Baltimore for guidance. Here's Mencken:

Whatever the true cause of the substitution of the preterite for the perfect participle, it seems to be a tendency inherent in English, and during the age of Elizabeth it showed itself even in the most formal speech. An examination of any play of Shakespeare’s will show many such forms as “I have wrote.” “I am mistook” and “he has rode.” In several cases this transfer for the preterite has survived. “I have stood,” for example, is now perfectly correct English, but before 1550 the form was “I have stonden.” To hold and to sit belong to the same class; their original perfect participles were not held and sat, but holden and sitten. These survived the movement toward the formalization of the language which began with the eighteenth century, but scores of other such misplaced preterites were driven out. One of the last to go was wrote, which persisted until near the end of the century. Paradoxically enough, the very purists who performed the purging showed a preference for got (though not forgot), and it survives in correct English today in the preterite-present form, as in “I have got,” whereas in American, both vulgar and polite, the elder and more regular gotten is often used. In the polite speech gotten indicates a distinction between a completed action and a continuing action—between obtaining and possessing. “I have gotten what I came for” is correct, and so is “I have got a house.” In the vulgar speech much the same distinction exists, but the perfect becomes a sort of simple tense by the elision of have. Thus the two sentences change to “I gotten what I come for” and “I got a house,” the latter being understood, not as past, but as present.

Case closed.

Comments

[ndm]

My (least) favourite wacky Americanism is "got off of the bus." I think the less said about "gotten" the better.

[Nathan P. Origer]

Alex, thanks for this wonderful post!

I should like to suggest, echoing ndm, that the less said about "gotten", the better; I take it a step further, suggesting that the less we employ the overused verb "to get", the better. English, with its multifarious synonyms for so many words, surely offers a better choice for most any instance that "get" suits, no?

[Sam G]

Context is all, my dear Massie: would your auld dominie have been content with this explanation, or would you have been writing out 100 times "I am in Scotland, not America"?

Hence my comment on your earlier piece: not (for once) complaining about a vulgarism, but about an Americanism in a blog which tends to justifiably pride itself on providing an external eye on our dear ex-colonial brothers across the Pond. I stand by "O tempora, O mores" as a perfectly apposite comment.

Unless, of course, you are leading a charge for a return to older forms more generally, in which case I look forward to reading your piece on the new SoS' efforts to resolve the Middle East entanglement: "Hillary lay y-bounden in a Gordian bond".

Cheerfully yours, etc.

[dearieme]

"vigour of American English": ah yes, I remember it well. RIP.

[ndm]

-- "O tempora, O mores"

This Roman stuff doesn't jive for those of us hailing from the gloomy side of Antonine's Wall.

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Vulgarity generally has a social and moral component. Whether deliberate or accidental, the substitution of a commonplace word that is not a euphemism draws attention to what may be a speaker's high-toned moral superiority or sophistication but a fatal flaw in the usage often reveals that the speaker's ambitions are not based in reality.

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