got

My mother always said ‘I think not’, rather then ‘I don’t think so’.

I’m pretty sure that I was taught at primary school that ‘ had gotten’ was more grammatical than ‘ had got ‘.

Are some of these 'issues' simply regional variations?
I think the split infinite began to lose out with Star Trek and 'to boldly go'.

springishere

I do love Pedants' corner, and can never resist adding to it. My current annoyances are "sat" instead of "sitting". (What has happened to the present participle?). Also the split infinitive e.g. "I told him to not run", "She decided to not do it".

I totally agree with you about ‘sat’; I also fume about people saying ‘lay’ instead of ‘lie’.

I do love Pedants' corner, and can never resist adding to it. My current annoyances are "sat" instead of "sitting". (What has happened to the present participle?). Also the split infinitive e.g. "I told him to not run", "She decided to not do it".

DaisyAnneReturns

Apparently, when we think Americans have got it wrong they are often closer to old Engish than we are - which is really annoying!

I hate gotten . I still try and remember all the English rules we were taught at primary and GS including not to use got .
I also hate the sound of words with the T missing. How do Scottish Grans think of Sco-land.
Another pet hate, I fink is "Fir-y free fousand pounds" I usually like regional accents Some of my GGC are bi-lingual in Northumberland and Sussex.
Can and May are two different words. It depends on the person when I answer that.
I am still amused by one of my pupils in a school 30 miles away from my home town who said "Don't you talk posh, Miss". which was a statement not a question.
I and my friend , a retired English teacher, have had some amusing discussions about English language.

Witzend

Shelflife

I remember in primary school the teacher saying " we never use the word 'got' its an ugly word. We also learned that when writing to never begin a sentence with the word ' And' .

IIRC a lot of sentences in the King James Bible begin with ‘and’.

I forget his exact words, but Winston Churchill evidently didn’t hold with the ‘no prepositions at the end of a sentence’ rule.

“This is the sort of thing up with which I will not put.” 😂

Churchill clearly didn’t understand the concept of the non-separable phrasal verb.

Gotta love that, looploo!

I bought some chocolate reindeers ( sic) from John Lewis. Wrote to the Cambridge Confectionary Company to point out the error and received some free choccies.

FranP

I read with children in school, and am appalled at some of the books they are allowed. American slang rubbish.

I often spend time helping them to pronounce and then tell them it is bad English

Oh.

I was wondering how schools are teaching English now.

Presumably anything goes?

Cliff Richard singing "It belongs to you and I." (from "In the Country") really annoys me. Others make the same mistake.

How about this one

Dinosaurs got extinct .....

Dinosaurs went extinct....

Dinosaurs became extinct

??????

I read with children in school, and am appalled at some of the books they are allowed. American slang rubbish.

I often spend time helping them to pronounce and then tell them it is bad English

I went to a grammar school in the late 60s and there were far more important daily issues than the use of 'got'.

The English language has evolved over the centuries and will continue to so once we've all moved on.

Suck it up buttercup.

Mollygo

downnotout
As school children though we 'got' the message. Or should that be we 'received' the message.
There are times when got is better IMO.
E.g. Your sentence or He got his just desserts!

If I asked a year 1 ^What have you got in your hand? The answer would be quick.
If I asked What are you concealing in your hand? the answer would probably be “What?” I then have to say, “Don’t say what, say pardon”

What is in your hands? What have you in your hands? No need for the additional GOT

Allsorts

Received.

They pick words to fit the space

Oh for heaven's sake! Get, got, gotten, all perfectly good Anglo-Saxon words, used by our best writers.
How this idea that they were to be avoided was planted into the heads of mid-century primary school teachers is a mystery.

The anti “pardon” brigade seemed to emerge around the same time Jilly Cooper published a book called Class. I think we can probably forgive our elders for absorbing some of that thinking.

By comparison, where you sat in the class war mattered far less to the post-war cohort, as a strong shift towards social democracy took hold, than it did to the pre-war generation - for whom the struggle to survive was closer to today’s America than to 1970s Great Britain.

Daddima

Mollygo

downnotout
As school children though we 'got' the message. Or should that be we 'received' the message.
There are times when got is better IMO.
E.g. Your sentence or He got his just desserts!

If I asked a year 1 ^What have you got in your hand? The answer would be quick.
If I asked What are you concealing in your hand? the answer would probably be “What?” I then have to say, “Don’t say what, say pardon”

Ooh, ‘pardon’ was forbidden in our house! We were told to say, ‘What did you say?’ or even just, ‘What?’

I actually posted about still thinking of alternatives to ‘got’ 65 years after Miss Duffy forbade its use!
We were also chastised for saying things like, ‘ I ate my dinner’, as she would tell us we would hardly eat someone else’s dinner!

Also, AskAlices mention of ‘brang’ reminds me that I have heard some fellow Scots use ‘jamp’ as the past tense of ‘jump’.

‘Pardon’ was forbidden in our house, too. It’s considered overly ‘genteel’ and prissy.

At school we were told not to use ‘nice’ - so naturally one girl wrote an essay with ‘nice’ in every sentence.

A language isn't static-it changes whether we like it or not !
All sorts of words were considered as vulgar or unsuitable when I went to preparatory school .
And (I'm breaking a rule here ) we had elocution lessons .
I remember my mother giving me the address book and telling ne to write the Christmas cards as she was too busy .
I wrote some casual words used in every day conversation and she was furious .
I had to do some of them again .
I also dislike sentences which begin with the word basically and at the end of the day.
Iconic is another word which I hear too frequently.

Just started re-reading Mansfield Park for the nth time. If Jane Austen can use 'got' (and she does, on the second page of her book) – "Fanny had got herself another child" – then the rest of us can too.

The word is from Old Norse as well as Old English. Nowt wrong with it and its multiple uses show how successful a piece of language it has been and still is.

Pompous teachers of old need to get off its back ;)

I would like to think that most of the teachers who made a big thing of using alternatives to words such as got and nice were simply aiming to enlarge their students' vocabulary, rather than totally erradicate those perfectly good words from it. If not, I would question their judgement and suitability to teach.

I've got a lot on this week.
We got a great deal on the car.
That got my goat.
You've got guts.

Not seeing anything wrong here..anyone got better alternatives?!

Mollygo

downnotout
As school children though we 'got' the message. Or should that be we 'received' the message.
There are times when got is better IMO.
E.g. Your sentence or He got his just desserts!

If I asked a year 1 ^What have you got in your hand? The answer would be quick.
If I asked What are you concealing in your hand? the answer would probably be “What?” I then have to say, “Don’t say what, say pardon”

Ooh, ‘pardon’ was forbidden in our house! We were told to say, ‘What did you say?’ or even just, ‘What?’

I actually posted about still thinking of alternatives to ‘got’ 65 years after Miss Duffy forbade its use!
We were also chastised for saying things like, ‘ I ate my dinner’, as she would tell us we would hardly eat someone else’s dinner!

Also, AskAlices mention of ‘brang’ reminds me that I have heard some fellow Scots use ‘jamp’ as the past tense of ‘jump’.

Mollygo

downnotout
As school children though we 'got' the message. Or should that be we 'received' the message.
There are times when got is better IMO.
E.g. Your sentence or He got his just desserts!

If I asked a year 1 ^What have you got in your hand? The answer would be quick.
If I asked What are you concealing in your hand? the answer would probably be “What?” I then have to say, “Don’t say what, say pardon”

The last part of your post has reminded me of something from my primary school days, when I was about nine.
A member of staff came into our classroom and announced, "I have a job for someone" (or words to that effect - it might have been "I've got a job for someone 😁)
One of the boys said "What?", and was sharply corrected by our class teacher with "It is pardon, not 'what'".
It was quite clear to me that the poor boy had not wanted the question repeating, but had wanted to know what the job was!

You can see how angry I felt on the boy's behalf, given that it still bothers me nearly sixty years later.