I’m getting pop-up ads for t-shirts. And sometimes their slogans are pop culture references I have no understanding of.
There’s the red t-shirt with the slogan “This Shirt Is Blue - If You Run Fast Enough”. I understand the joke here; it’s a reference to blueshifting in astronomy. So I’m good on that.
But there’s what appears to be a follow-up item. It’s a blue t-shirt with the slogan “This Shirt Is Blue - You Don’t Need Run Fast Enough”. Now I understand this slogan is a reference to the previous slogan. But read it carefully; there’s a missing word. It should say you don’t need to run fast enough.
So is this just a typo that got past whatever passes for copyediting at a t-shirt factory? Or is the missing word an obscure reference to something I don’t know?
The supposedly missing word is “to”, right? Like “You don’t need to run fast enough.”
I’m not sure it is an error at all. I think there may be some old-fashioned forms of English which allow it to be missing. I wish I knew the grammar rules to explain myself better.
But the same sort of person who might say, “I should like to go for a stroll,” might also say, “You don’t need do that, my dear.” (rather than “you don’t need to do that”)
It’s not any grammar rule that I’ve ever heard of. And I know enough grammar to know I should be saying it’s not any grammar rule of which I have ever heard.
I’d buy the generic example “You need not do that” or in the t-shirt’s case “you need not run fast”.
But I don’t buy that “This Shirt Is Blue - You Don’t Need Run Fast Enough” as seen on the shirt is a valid example of that sentence structure.
OTOH, the website is Aussie and Aussie English, like other COmmonwealth flavors of English seems to have retained more of the “quaint” usages that American English has largely dropped.
IOW, even a fairly uneducated American will immediately understand “You need not do [whatever]”. But even a highly educated professorial sort of American is exceedingly unlikely to say or write that same sentence.
I could certainly buy that there’s some local dialect of English for which that sentence would be grammatical. Whether it’s “old-fashioned” or not is irrelevant.
Perhaps the t-shirt writer thought he was running out of shirt space. Anyway, he could have solved that by saying “This Shirt Is Blue - You Needn’t Run Fast Enough.” However, joke t-shirts are often of poor quality, and the blue might not be color-fast and will fade and bleed into the lettering. One of my favorites from the time when I was wearing humor shirts said, “Support Your Right To Arm Bears.” It showed a bear with some purloined picnic baskets and a rifle.