It drives me nuts when people say “He’s ADD” or “He might be ADD”, instead of “He has ADD”, or “He might have ADD”. They do it with other conditions too - what prompted me posting this thread was reading “He might be hyperthyroid” in another thread.
ADD is the name of the condition. Saying “He’s ADD” means that he is ADD itself, not just a sufferer of it. It’s dehumanizing in a way, not to mention strangely annoying.
The other day, someone I know said “Gee, I hope I’m not skin cancer,” after noticing a “mole” on their arm. Yeah, that really would suck, wouldn’t it. Especially since skin cancer isn’t a sentient being.
I think the confusion comes about because saying “He’s bipolar” makes perfect sense. The difference is, “bipolar” is an adjective, while “bipolar disorder” is the name of the condition. People don’t go around saying “He’s bipolar disorder”
After reading it over, this is sort of a lame pitting. Not enough anger. But I think I’m going to post it anyway.
When I was a kid, a friend tried to indicate that a neighbor was screwing his own sister, so he put it as “Greg and Laura are incest!” (or whatever their names where). As if “in” and “cest” were two different words, and when you boink a relative you go into the state of “cest”.
Absolute, you’re hearing a form of vernacular that elides whole words instead of just sounds, and that is an unsettling experience. I can pretty confidently predict, however, that you will make neither progress nor friends in your fight against it, and will have to take comfort in knowing that you are not alone. In fact, you are up against a very mild form of the syndrome, which most commonly is the tendency for otherwise normal people to omit any mention of the construction “to be” from their sentences. “The baby needs to be fed,” becomes “Baby needs fed.” “Please cut the grass,” is rejected in favor of “The lawn needs mowed.” Not even “needs mowing,” for pity’s sake, but “needs mowed.” The most elementary verb form in this or any language in the history of the planet, just … discarded. Only solution: suppress the symptoms and get over it.
While I agree that it is bad grammar, I don’t agree that it is dehumanizing. I have spent sometime in a mental hospital and I know a lot of people with various conditions and it is used by the people themselves. Occasionally I find myself saying “I’m ADD” rather than “I have ADD” just because it is so common.
I thought I heard that this is common in a particular pocket of the East Coast…maybe Rhode Island??? How can they think this is ok? It’s not like you can read this in books or anything!
My pet peeve is people who have a sinus infection and proclaim that they “have sinus”. We ALL have a sinus cavity. If it’s ailing, it’s a SINUS INFECTION.
I hear it a little bit around Cleveland. Maybe it’s just from folks who were raised a bit closer to Youngstown, where folks still speak some Pittsburghese.
Well actually we all have “some” sinus cavities. We don’t ALL have ALL sinus cavities. Something like 5% of the population don’t have a frontal sinus - I would be one of them . . .
This post reminded me of a saying used by some people with <condition>. They say, “I have <condition>; <condition> doesn’t have me!”
Actually, there’s nothing even grammatically wrong with “He’s ADD” or whatever. The contractions in “-'s” stand for “has” equally as well as “is,” just as “-'d” can equally well be “had” or “sh/would.” Nobody would mistake “He’s been going there every summer for years” as “He is been…” rather than the proper “He has been…” Just as “He’d been a Republican” is “He had been…” while “He’d have been a 50-year member” is “He would have been…”
There is a very real problem in some medical-related uses equating patient to disease, and if Absolute is correct it appears to be carrying over to lay usage as well. But not the one he started the OP with.
Actually, in view of what the acronym stands for, it would not be as great a solecism as it sounds, merely presuming that there is a single disability, existing as sort of a defective Platonic form, which individual people may have. “He has the disability characterized by attention deficit” would be a perfectly sound sentence with the same meaning.
