Janie asks <a href="http://davidhewson.com/2010/06/11/a-nasty-little-word-to-be-avoided/#comment-2006" target="_blank">in a comment here</a>, ‘Will you please take on the usage of ‘gotten’ as the past participle of the verb ‘to get’? It’s ‘got’. [But I'm sure I'll hear a lot of flak about it.]’

If you’re on my half of the Atlantic, Janie, you’re right. The past participle of the verb ‘get’ is undoubtedly ‘got’. If you’re on the American side things are different. You can choose to say ‘got’ but it’s grammatically correct to say ‘gotten’ too. That’s the funny thing about new countries. For some reason their language gets frozen to an extent, in a way that doesn’t happen in their mother lands.

<!--more-->

Winston Churchill famously once said that Britain and America were two countries divided by a common language. He was spot on. America has a lot of words that Brits regard as weird amendments to our pure mother tongue. Nothing could be further than the truth. ‘Gotten’ is old, traditional English. Shakespeare used it. Here’s the messenger in <em>Henry IV Part Two…</em>
<blockquote>Jack Cade hath gotten London bridge</blockquote>
Over the years the English have mangled and shortened our language and for<em>gotten</em> some of the original. You may regard us as misbe<em>gotten</em> for doing so but that’s what language is like the more you use it. Changeable.

Lots of the American English usages Brits find strange are in fact more ‘pure’ and, if you want to look at it that way, ‘correct’ than what we now regard as the Queen’s English. ‘Fall’ for ‘autumn’ goes back to Elizabethan times but is never heard in the UK today. Similarly I suspect Brits haven’t used the word ‘period’ for ‘full stop’ for centuries.

Americans have kept hold of words the English abandoned long ago, some so far in the past we no longer know what they mean. ‘Broil’ foxes the average Brit – is that boil or something? Yet Shakespeare used the word frequently – this from <em>Richard III: </em>
<blockquote>And being seated, and domestic broils</blockquote>
‘Diaper’ was in use in Elizabethan England, clearly sailed with the Mayflower and stayed in America while dying out in its land of origin. Walk into an English plumber and waffle on about ‘faucets’ and ‘spigots’ and no one will have a clue what you’re talking about. Here’s that rogue Pistol in <em>The Merry Wives of Windsor…</em>
<blockquote>O base Hungarian wight! wilt thou the spigot wield?</blockquote>
Some American oddities – ‘druthers’ for example – are inventions. Other usages are plain bizarre – never ask for an ‘English muffin’ in England because you’ll be met with blank looks. But the honest truth is that any American assailed by a Brit for mangling the glorious English language can probably turn round and point out, with plenty of justification, that his version is more ‘traditional’ than ours.

Not that tradition matters much. Language is a living thing. It evolves under Darwinian principles mostly, except when a touch of colonial fundamentalism throws a spanner in the works for a while. The Canadian version of French, Mexican Spanish and even the Italian of North American immigrants to America from the late 19th and early 20th all contain words you no longer hear back ‘home’. Each to their own.

So ‘gotten’ isn’t ‘wrong’. It’s just optional and, to these ears anyway, a touch ugly. I wouldn’t use it even if I could.