etymology - "I've gotten better-looking as I get older" When did "gotten" re-enter the BrEng vernacular?


This summer I went to Ireland, to be more precise Dublin. Overall good weather and good fun. Anyway, while I was staying in Dublin I'd buy the local newspaper and one tabloid headline caught my eye.


Issue of the Irish Daily Mail from Monday, June 30, 2014, folded in half. Banner image has three columns, first is a picture of a woman, second is the text


Now I've thought long and hard before posting this question because I don't want to know or hear that sentence is correct if it's spoken by a native speaker. Tell me it's dialectal, tell me it's peculiar to Irish (Is Miriam an Irish speaker? I don't know any more because I've thrown out the rag), tell me that it's American English "slang" which has caught on in the UK and in Ireland. But more than anything else, please tell me if that statement is grammatical.


If it had been me, I would have said:



I've become better-looking as I've got older


or at a stretch


I'm better-looking as I get older



I prefer the hyphen in better-looking, am I mistaken? Is this punctuation symbol superfluous? Isn't gotten AmEng? In BrEng the conjugation of the verb get is get, got, got but wiktionary tells me that gotten is archaic British English. I can't pinpoint why that headline bothers me so much, but it does. Can someone explain if this sentence is grammatical/ungrammatical and why?


Thank you.



EDIT


Some users have commented the dissonance of different tenses used in the statement. The present perfect I've gotten, with the present simple I get older.


Perhaps the present perfect continuous I've been getting older would be more appropriate because it expresses an action that began in the past but is still in progress. Whereas the present perfect I've gotten better-looking might be "perfect" for describing an action that began in the past whose results are felt in the present. All of which leads me to conclude that the following sentence is more grammatically acceptable



I've got better-looking as I've been getting older.




EDIT TWO


On EL&U today I saw this question pop up: Differences between "I have got" and "I have gotten" The highest voted answer says



In general, "have got" is the present perfect form of "to get" in UK English, while "have gotten" is the US English version.



While a second contributor quoting from The Cambridge Encyclopedia of English Language wrote



Gotten is probably the most distinctive of all the AmE/BrE grammatical differences, but British people who try to use it often get it wrong.


It is not simply an alternative for have got. Gotten is used in such contexts as


They've gotten a new boat. (= obtain)
They've gotten interested. (= become)
He's gotten off the chair. (= moved)



It appears to me the headline in The Irish Daily Mail clearly conflicts with both these claims.



EDIT THREE
As correctly pointed out in @fdb's answer "I do not know why you think that Ireland is part of Britain." I made a serious mistake in my second edit and title, Ireland has been a republic since 1922. The six Northern counties in the north east of Ireland who chose to remain in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland are British.


But because I am no longer resident in the United Kingdom, I was surprised by the Irish headline. As a child I don't think I ever said gotten but I was conscious of it being American and to me it was "slang". If gotten is currently used in Ireland, an island which is only 496 Km from England, and American English is omnipresent, it seems likely that "gotten" should be part of the BrEng vernacular. If that is the case...


When did "gotten" re-enter the BrEng vernacular?



Answer



There are several possible problems, but most of them are matters of style rather than grammar.


Get rather than become could be considered unimaginative or ugly, but I suspect those who think it so are haunted by the ghost of an English teacher inculcating rules rather than commonsense: personally I get older every day, and would never say become older.


As I get older cannot be justified in that position - grammatically. The sub-editor who composed the strapline may have been in a hurry, or it may be a deliberate mistake. Do not forget that headlines are not, in most cases, required to do anything other than grab your attention -if the journalist knew that his error had caused a discussion like this (and possibly somebody taking the trouble to try and find the original story), he would consider it a job well done.


Better-looking would normally be hyphenated, but again that is subject to journalistic requirements; space is at a premium in headlines, and the omission does no harm.


Gotten for got is the interesting part. Gotten is certainly archaic, and several dictionaries call it "especially U.S."; but it's not wrong. The best reason why it is used here is the rhythm; the three trochees of gotten better-looking sound better and are more memorable than I get or I've got, and certainly better than the dreadful (but grammatically correct) I have got. Whether that was a deliberate decision by the writer I know not. If Miriam is an actor, it may well be a verbatim quote; nobody knows better the value of memorable wording.


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