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Comment by scop | Hacker News Reader

> has got really good

For whatever reason that turn of phrase seems very amateur/lazy coming from the Economist.

This is a perfect example of why complaining about grammar is so stupid. Got is correct in UK English, it just sounds wrong in US English.

Different dialects do things differently.

I complain about people complaining about grammar.

For the most part I really like the UK, but one thing I can't stand is how they think that their English is "the real one". I once used the American "gotten" in the above construction and was "corrected" by a British person. I think that correcting other country's variants as if your country somehow had the objectively correct variant, makes you sound provincial.

Thank you, thought I was going crazy. Maybe this is the new thing, adding grammatical errors so people won't think the content was written by AI.

Human slop to compete with AI slop. It's not like they have the balls to sign articles with their names personally.

I have to agree.

I was going to say, just plain grammatically incorrect.

At first I though this had to be a truncation for the purpose of the HN subject line, but no, it's the actual title of the article.

Could this be a difference between English and American?

It’s incompetence,

it’s purposeful (“think different”) to get attention,

It’s a shout out to a common slang where past participles (gotten) get used in place of simple past tense (“I seen this before” which should be “I saw this before”) but here is the other swap, the simple past "got" used where the past participle "gotten" belongs.

Languages change, get over it. "Proper" language is directly the result of the same things that you're complaining about happening over and over again.

If we actually stuck to a perfect defined grammer, language would never evolve

I've got years of linguistics background, nothing to get over here.

The interesting thing you may or may not know is that this use of a past participle for a simple past actually has become normalized, in the languages change sense, in Russian, for one example. In English, it's usually less educated or second language acquisition speakers who make that substitution.

Yeah, so what?

English itself has been shaped by speakers of various languages in its entire history, and native dialectics do this kind of thing all the time too

Yes, of course.

It's a British vs. American difference. Americans prefer "gotten": "California has gotten good at building batteries." The British view "gotten" as ungrammatical.

I came here to say exactly this. I feel like I learned the proper way to write this before first grade, and that was in rural Iowa. How are the editors of a historically respected publication allowing this through?

Upon reading further found this: "would be a double whammy)." with no opening parenthesis to be found. Seems like sloppy writing and editing throughout.

You learned proper American English. "Gotten" is generally discouraged in British English.

Back in the Second Millennium when I used to hang out at Radio Shack, their ad slogan was "You've Got Questions; We've Got Answers!"

And I made friends with one fellow tending the store there, and I would overhear him answering the store's phone: "Thank you for calling Radio Shack! You have questions; we have answers!"

And I would be mildly amused that he steadfastly held to the rules of grammar in verbal discourse, but I was also a bit disappointed; a loyal Radio Shack employee would lean into the dissonance and take one for the team.

I myself would gladly say the line, with a big grin on my face every time. I would, however, welcome my telephone persona being replaced by an A.I.

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