This is a one-off post, if you will pardon the expression, because as far as I know, this usage appears in only one American publication. Backing up a bit, I am referring the the past participle form of the verb to get, which in British English is got and in American English is gotten. So, for example, we would say, “By that time I had gotten angry”; they, “got angry.” (This shouldn’t be confused with the very American “got” used to mean “have,” e.g.,”I got plenty of nuthin’.”) The distinction had appeared as early as 1908, when (as quoted in Garner’s Modern American English), a writer in Blackwood’s Magazine observed:
“America need not boast the use of ‘gotten.’ The termination, which suggests either wilful archaism or useless slang, adds nothing of sense or sound to the word. It is like a piece of dead wood in a tree, and is better lopped off.”
The American magazine I referred to earlier is The New Yorker. Among its several stylistic peculiarities (spelling the word “marvellous,” putting an umlaut over the second o in “cooperate”) is an insistence on this “got.” The normally very sharp Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage claims that “English speakers in North America seem to use both got and gotten in a way that is almost freely variable.” However, of the four sources the book cites for got, four (Calvin Trillin, Alexander Woollcott, Peter Taylor, and John Cheever) are New Yorker writers, with Russell Lynes the only outlier.
The New Yorker seems to have developed its affection for got early. Its online archives gives examples from the early 1930s, including a James Thurber Talk of the Town piece from 1931:
“An African novelist was supposed to speak at the Women’s Club of Maplewood, New Jersey, and the girls were all excited. He didn’t show up, and two days later they discovered he had got into a fist fight with a plasterer in a speakeasy and had landed in jail instead.”
That was one thing in the speakeasy era, but the usage seems seriously weird today. However, one comes upon it nearly every week in the magazine, including, very recently, a Lawrence Wright article from February 14, 2011: “When she was a young child, her stepfather had got the family involved with Scientology.”
This affectation bugs me so much that I started a Facebook group called “Get the New Yorker to Use ‘Gotten’ Instead of ‘Got.'” Call me crazy, but 135 people have joined, including some actual New Yorker writers, one being none other than Lawrence Wright. I guess he is trying to effect change from within. Good luck, Lawrence!
notoneoffbritishisms.com 
Other New Yorker usage oddities include “vender” and “focusses”: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/archive/index.php/t-382229.html
That’s interesting, Fritinancy. Thanks. “Focusses” (as present tense third person verb) makes sense to me, because normal pronunciation rules would lead you to incorrectly say “focuses” to rhyme with “abuses.”
“Vender” (instead of “vendor”) would seem to have a parallel case in “adviser”/”advisor.” In both instances the “-er” spelling was the earlier one, with “-or” following in hot pursuit. Google Ngram shows “vendor” taking over from “vender” in about 1780. “Adviser” still is used more in the printed sources that Ngram tracks than “advisor,” but the lead is narrowing–and “advisor” wins by far in a Google search, which is, of course, not limited to books and magazines. About 100% of my advisees at the U. of Delaware refer to me as their “advisor.”
One interesting thing to me about the ascent of both “advisor” and “vendor” is that they sound like Britishisms, but are not.
Focusses? Does that rhyme with the ‘cusses’ it contains?
What about buses, catctuses, calluses, campuses, circuses, discuses and so on and on? Verbs? ‘Bus, buses or (very rarely) busses’ and ‘chorus, choruses’. OK, all the other verbs I can think of end with ‘use’ and ‘uses’ and are stressed on that syllable and so rhyme with ‘ooze’ and ‘oozes’, but those three are verbed nouns with the stress before the ‘us’ syllable and to my eye sit better with a single ‘s’. It would surely be a rare noob who had never seen ‘focus’ and so pronounced ‘focuses’ to rhyme with ‘accuses’.
I’m curious, does the New Yorker write bonusses or bonuses? If they go for the latter, do they have a reason (that we know of) for the apparent inconsistency, or do they just think focusses looks right?
They write bonuses (and also choruses, chorused, chorusing). The reasoning is, according to Mary Norris, that they use double consonants whenever “possible”, and by “possible” they mean accepted by Merriam-Webster. Focussed is listed in M-W (as an alternative to focused), chorussed isn’t. End of story.
It isn’t about pronunciation rules: they don’t apply rules, they just refer to an authority. Which is sensible when you’re working under deadline.
It’s not an umlaut, which indicates that the vowel makes a different sound than you’d otherwise expect. It’s a diaresis, indicating that you say the vowel separately, rather than as a single digraph.
“Diaresis” is such an unfortunate word for a perfectly good diacritic.
I had seen the term before, but a little research explains the trouble:
“[I]n well-designed typographical fonts umlaut dots will be very close to the letter’s body, while diaresis dots will be a bit farther up with a bit more of white space between the letter and the dots. In computer screen fonts the difference is usually not noticeable.” (http://www.wordiq.com/definition/Diaeresis#Umlaut)
But you never need the dots in English. They draw attention to themselves, like the stroke some people put across the figure seven.
I’ve got nothing against “got.” Been using it for years, but I’ve gotten used to variation depending on nuance.
Hmmm, “By that time I had got angry” isn’t very good English anyway. I’d rephrase it into “By then, I was angry”, or “by that time I had become angry”. I think the translation between got and gotten isn’t quite right in that particular case.
As I said elsewhere, dictionary.net lists gotten as obsolescent. To me, it sounds old-fashioned, rural, Farrrmerrrrr Goiles-ish and it grates on me. We’ve got at least three perfectly acceptable alternatives if “got” won’t do: “obtained”, “acquired”, “received” etc.
You mean you’ve acquired those alternatives?
This is interesting to me, a Brit. No Brit would ever say gotten unless they were consciously mimicking a stereotypical American. So, gotten seems wrong to me, although I accept that it is perfectly valid for Americans to have this usage.
What I found interesting is that I had always assumed it was an old-fashioned usage, even in America, harking back to Wild West days. But Ben’s article implies that, the New Yorker aside, gotten is the standard, even for the most literate, educated Americans.
Also interesting on vender/adviser. Vender would always be vendor in the UK. I’m not sure vender would be understood. Advisor is common, but is widely seen as an Americanism, to be resisted!
Just curious … Do those who write “had got” also write “had forgot”? Or “had forgotten”?
Good question. I, a Brit, would happily use either, though I would probably say that forgotten is to be preferred.
I remember reading, in pre-internet days, and from an American source, that gotten was in common use in England in Tudor times. It went out of fashion in England, but was retained in US English.