Re: USAGE: pronouncing "l", "needs washed"

Quoth Jeffrey Henning:
> > But the thing I don't get is that a few years ago, I first heard the
> > construction, "that shirt needs washed" from my wife.  (I would say,
> > "that shirt needs to be washed," or "that shirt needs washing."  To
> > me, "washed" is not a nominal, and therefore cannot be used as the
> > direct object of "needs," whereas "to be washed" and "washing" are
> > both nominals.)
> >
> > Now I'm noticing it in the speech of almost everyone I know from the
> > midwest.  But I *never* heard it, growing up in Michigan.
>
> I heard that plenty growing up in eastern Ohio, though some of my relatives
> would have said, "that shirt needs warshed."  Oh, how I miss my
> grandmother -- she warshed, she sat on the davenport, she bought us pop, she
> liked smearcase, she made kolaches, she swept (rather than vacuumed or
> hoovered), she sat on the shore teaching me to suck... eggses... eggses it
> is!  And she did a hundred other wonderful things that have nothing to do
> with American dialects.
I heard the "needs washed" construction all the time at my undergrad (in
Quincy, IL); it is highly typical of the Midlands dialect region, whose
northern boundary lies about 10 miles south of I-90 and whose southern
boundary is... erm... I'm not sure exactly where, probably running
through Tennessee and Virginia somewhere.  But Milwaukee, Michigan, and
Chicago (my home city) are part of the northern dialect region, and I
really find the construction jarring. :)

As for the nifty things your gramma did, I have to say I haven't heard
*any* of them before *except* for "davenport", which my grandparents
(from South Dakota) used.  They never used any other word for it
("couch", "sofa") that I remember, but nor did anyone else I knew ever
use that word.  Funny thing.

--
-=-Don Blaheta-=-=-dpb@cs.brown.edu-=-=-<http://www.cs.brown.edu/~dpb/>-=-
Experience is the thing you have left when everything else is gone.