2019 US-to-UK Word of the Year: gotten
For part 1 of the 2019 Words of the Year, click here. Now we're on to the US-to-UK WotY. Radzi Chinyanganya, WotY inspiration I had pretty much decided not to do a US-to-UK Word of the Year for 2019. The words nominated were generally ones that had made a big splash in English recently on both sides of the Atlantic, rather than long-standing Americanisms that were making a splash in Britain. I had begun to think that BrE had reached peak Americanism. But then I went through my top tweets of the year, and saw one that made me think: "Oh yeah, that's it." The US-to-UK Word of the Year is: gotten Here's the tweet that reminded me: I'll admit getting teary over @iamradzi 's departure from Blue Peter , but the reason (for a linguist) to watch his 'best of' episode is the number of times he says 'gotten'. It really is making a comeback in UK. If we can resurrect a verb paradigm, imagine what else we can do 😉 — Lynne Murphy (@lynneguist) A...