"Gotten" in the US editions of the HP books

[emmagrant01]

In a private conversation about Brit-picking, a friend of mine told me that she'd seen the word "gotten" in her (American) copy of HPSS. I have the PDFs of the US versions of all the books, so I thought I'd do a search on "gotten" and see what I found.

It turns out that there are 20 occurrences of the word "gotten" in SS, two of them in dialogue (one said by Ron and one by Hermione). I also have the British editions of the books, and in them each of these is "got". So this was clearly a change made by the American editors, possibly because it made the text "sound right" to American readers.

I extracted all of the examples in SS and they are posted below. I included chapter numbers but not page numbers, since those vary so much.

20 occurrences in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone:

It looked as though Dudley had gotten the new computer he wanted, not to mention the second television and the racing bike. [Ch 2]

The only thing Harry liked about his own appearance was a very thin scar on his forehead that was shaped like a bolt of lightning. He had had it as long as he could remember, and the first question he could ever remember asking his Aunt Petunia was how he had gotten it. [Ch 2]

Next morning, however, he had gotten up to find his hair exactly as it had been before Aunt Petunia had sheared it off. [Ch 2]

On the other hand, he'd gotten into terrible trouble for being found on the roof of the school kitchens. [Ch 2]

Harry recognized him at once from the card he'd gotten out of the Chocolate Frog on the train. [Ch 7]

Albus Dumbledore had gotten to his feet. He was beaming at the students, his arms opened wide, as if nothing could have pleased him more than to see them all there. [Ch 7]

The pain had gone as quickly as it had come. Harder to shake off was the feeling Harry had gotten from the teacher's look -- a feeling that he didn't like Harry at all. [Ch 7]

Just then, the mail arrived. Harry had gotten used to this by now, but it had given him a bit of a shock on the first morning, when about a hundred owls had suddenly streamed into the Great Hall during breakfast, circling the tables until they saw their owners, and dropping letters and packages onto their laps. [Ch 8]

At the start-of-term banquet, Harry had gotten the idea that Professor Snape disliked him. By the end of the first Potions lesson, he knew he'd been wrong. [Ch 8]

At breakfast on Thursday she bored them all stupid with flying tips she'd gotten out of a library book called Quidditch Through the Ages. [Ch 9]

"We should have gotten more than ten points," Ron grumbled. [Ch 10]

He didn't know how he'd have gotten through all his homework without her, what with all the last-minute Quidditch practice Wood was making them do. [Ch 11]

"I've heard of those," he said in a hushed voice, dropping the box of Every Flavor Beans he'd gotten from Hermione. "If that's what I think it is -- they're really rare, and really valuable." [Ch 12]

Percy Weasley stuck his head through the door, looking disapproving. He had clearly gotten halfway through unwrapping his presents as he, too, carried a lumpy sweater over his arm, which Fred seized. [Ch 12]

Then, during one particularly wet and muddy practice session, Wood gave the team a bit of bad news. He'd just gotten very angry with the Weasleys, who kept dive-bombing each other and pretending to fall off their brooms. [Ch 13]

Hermione jumped to her feet. She hadn't looked so excited since they'd gotten back the marks for their very first piece of homework. [Ch 13]

Little did Harry know that Ron and Hermione had been secretly practicing the Leg-Locker Curse. They'd gotten the idea from Malfoy using it on Neville, and were ready to use it on Snape if he showed any sign of wanting to hurt Harry. [Ch 13]

"What am I studying for? Are you crazy? You realize we need to pass these exams to get into the second year? They're very important, I should have started studying a month ago, I don't know what's gotten into me...." [Ch 14]

Filch was already there -- and so was Malfoy. Harry had also forgotten that Malfoy had gotten a detention, too. [Ch 15]

It winked and put the Stone back in its pocket -- and as it did so, Harry felt something heavy drop into his real pocket. Somehow -- incredibly -- he'd gotten the Stone. [Ch 17]

The number of occurrences was lower in the other books, but doesn't really seem to follow a pattern:

COS: 0 occurrences
POA: 9 occurrences (3 in dialogue)
GOF: 11 occurrences (3 in dialogue)
OOTP: 0 occurrences
HBP: 1 occurrence

Interesting. :-)

ETA: Thanks to dorrie6 for this interesting link: American Pie: American/British English Translation, and to atdelphi for the link to this list of all the differences between PS (UK) and SS(US), including many things I didn't know were different. :-P

Comments

[darth-kittius.livejournal.com]

Not to argue here but I'd like to point out that while kids can figure out the BE because they're similar words there is some worry about their habits (no judgment meant on BE or AE superiority here). For example, since I grew up near Canada I picked up the BE spellings of theatre and colour. I was continually marked down whenever I would use them on tests and papers throughout elementary and high school. Even in college there were a few instances where they let me know that spelling would count - in my haste to write a coherent essay and worry about content I slipped up and used the BE spelling and was marked down. Since schools are (and are in the right to) only allow AE, then it could be a 'bad habit' for kids to learn the BE spellings. Otherwise they'll be brats like I was and bring in the books as evidence for their continued misspellings.

[atdelphi.livejournal.com]

I definitely see where you're coming from. As I said...somewhere above, it's really not the spellings that bother me so much as replacing British phrases and grammar when it's being spoken or applied to British characters in a British setting (we wouldn't be talking about this at all if the book were set entirely in magical fantasy land.) But to go off on a tangent, at the same time, I think it's definitely an American phenomenon to do this with the spelling; American spelling in American works isn't changed to British in the U.K. and Canada. Rather, I think it's assumed that kids have to start learning somewhere that there are some variations between dialects of English, and that it's the schools' place to reinforce which rules are correct for formal writing in their area.

Is it courting bad habits for kids to read British spellings and grammar and phrases in Tolkien or C.S. Lewis or Dickens? Would it be appropriate to make revised American editions to that end? Would there be protestations if works set firmly in the U.S. were rewritten in the U.K. to have Laura Ingalls and her family eating blood pudding, or Tom Sawyer's nineteenth century slang cleaned up to something more recognisably British, or the Babysitter's Club using the metric system?

Honestly, I'm not trying to be facetious or even rhetorical - I'm just curious about what this says about our current views on language variation and the rise of the U.S. as the global default, and the expectations or lack thereof we put on our kids these days, and the permanence or impermanence of the written word. I'll definitely be chewing this one over for a while, myself. :-)

[darth-kittius.livejournal.com]

I agree with you that I think this is an interesting discussion that I'll be thinking about myself for quite a while. And it doesn't help that I couple it mentally with my general cynicism at American public schools and the state of our children's education outside of school. Which means that all of my comments can be taken largely with a grain of salt because I neither have nor spend time around children, so I really have no concept of what they can or can not deal with - I only hear stories of the back talking from teachers in my family!

As for your questions, I don't know that I can really answer them properly. I didn't read Tolkien or Dickens until high school (Dickens) and post-grad (Tolkien). As an International Politics major, I was already well aware of the differences in English and thus didn’t even notice that I was reading BE and not AE. I'd have to look back just to identify where in those novels I would have noticed it.

For C.S. Lewis, that would be the same age-group reading the books. Again, I don't remember what I thought reading them myself. For all I know that could be where I picked up the bad spelling habits and I've just blamed it on reading too much of the Toronto newspapers all these years.

I think what's interesting is that I didn't even know there were these changes or that they were that big of a deal until I started being involved in fandom. I mean, the point is supposed to be the story and these individual word choices really don't impact that. Which is probably one of the reasons I get a bit annoyed (although I generally try to remove my feelings from any discussion I'm having in fandom) with some of the britpicking -- although I've never used the word gotten, so this particular discussion isn't applicable. I'm fairly well-read, very highly-educated in International Politics. I understand the differences between cultures and am pretty well aware of some of the different word choices that one should make when writing for a British canon. However, even I sometimes have no clue that something would be called/done differently. Many in fandom call this lazy research. I don't. Because quite frankly I'm not going to research every single word of my fic to make sure that it's appropriate. I'm only going to look up those words/actions that I think could be different.

Somewhere else on this discussion someone was listing some common britpicking errors that bother them. Some I had never heard of! And I've read these discussions for several years! It would have never occurred to me that those words weren't used in the same manner they are over here. Additionally, although I understand your points completely, if the text was changed for printing in the US, then why is it so wrong for US-based fic writers to use their canon to write fic? There are days when I feel like it's getting to the point that fic headers should have a line for which canon they're using up with the warnings.

[atdelphi.livejournal.com]

Additionally, although I understand your points completely, if the text was changed for printing in the US, then why is it so wrong for US-based fic writers to use their canon to write fic?

...er, I didn't say it was? In fact, my original reply was that I thought someone shouldn't be jumped on for using "gotten", especially if that's used in the American editions. From there, I just went on to say that I personally find it silly that there's a different U.S. version at all.

If you've got access to a journal collection, I'd really recommend Jane Whitehead's "This is Not What I Wrote!: The Americanization of Children's Books" parts 1 and 2 [Horn Book 72.3 (1996) and Horn Book 73.1 (1997)] which is a great commentary on the phenomenon, and delves into issues such as the decreasing number of international works being published for American kids and the correlational decline in American children's awareness of other countries, and whether Americanizing defeats the purpose of international exposure through literature or the intent of providing American children with the same reading experience as British ones.

[darth-kittius.livejournal.com]

Yes, sorry, I was not clear - that time my question at the end was rhetorical/directed at the uber-britpickers (as I call them). Not you! I should have been more clear!!

That sounds very interesting - I will look it up the next time I get a chance to go to my ex-Universities library (I love those Alumnae privileges, but it does take time to accumulate enough citations to spend a day up there doing pleasure research). Thanks for the reference!!

[atdelphi.livejournal.com]

Yes, sorry, I was not clear - that time my question at the end was rhetorical/directed at the uber-britpickers (as I call them). Not you! I should have been more clear!!

Oh, good - I was worried I'd said something that was taken the wrong way. :-) When things like this pop up, I always feel thankful that I'm in a very polite little old-school corner of the HP fandom, because I don't tend to encounter the people who go overboard on criticism and the like.

[darth-kittius.livejournal.com]

I have a bad habit of slipping into the rhetorical... I need to remember that not everyone on LJ reads my journal and therefore they don't know that the bottom of most of my posts contain rhetorical questions or some sort of sarcasm. I really need to watch that when commenting on other people's posts! :)

[atdelphi.livejournal.com]

I hear you. :-) I think I have to be more careful of how I put things too - going by the follow-up post, it seems like there have been some pretty big misunderstandings on this one.

[emmagrant01.livejournal.com]

Just to be clear, none of what I posted about in my follow-up post was about you. Not at all. :-)

[atdelphi.livejournal.com]

Good to know - I was actually mostly talking about the comments, rather than your post. Some of the sentiments being expressed there make me think that either people didn't read the threads at all or that they're misinterpreting a lot that was said. Either way, this discussion has really opened my eyes to some fandom politics and personal views I was previously unaware of.