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> has got really good For whatever reason that turn of phrase seems very amateur/lazy coming from the Economist.
by scop 1y ago
> has got really good
For whatever reason that turn of phrase seems very amateur/lazy coming from the Economist.
- johnea 1y agoI 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?
- antognini 1y agoIt's a British vs. American difference. Americans prefer "gotten": "California has gotten good at building batteries." The British view "gotten" as ungrammatical.
- jjtheblunt 1y agoIt’s incompetence, Or it’s purposeful (“think different”) to get attention, Or 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.
- andoando 1y agoLanguages 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
- jjtheblunt 1y agoI'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.
- andoando 1y agoYeah, 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
- jjtheblunt 1y agoYes, of course.
- riknos314 1y agoI 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?
- 20wenty 1y agoThank 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.
- burnt-resistor 1y agoHuman slop to compete with AI slop. It's not like they have the balls to sign articles with their names personally.
- amanaplanacanal 1y agoThis 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.
- jxjnskkzxxhx 1y agoI 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.
- AStonesThrow 1y agoBack 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.