Idioms like "Your dog needs trained". Who, what, where, etc.?

[Chessic_Sense]

@Jerseyman

Methinks thou hast it! (If we’re going to talk dialect). It looks to me like a misreading of the plural of the noun need as the third of the verb need.
…
This Dog needs trained looks like a new dialect form developing for the same sort of thing. It’s overlapping the two very close ideas of The room needs to be cleaned and I want the room cleaned via the used of ‘needs’ in the sense of ‘requirements’ in other related contexts.

Did you just make that up? You seem to be under the impression that users of this construction are stupid, and that we just started using it yesterday. Might wanna let the experts handle this one:

like, need, or want + past participle:
Murray, Frazer and Simon 1996
Tenny 1998; McElhinny 1999
Murray and Simon 1999
Montgomery 2001
Johnstone, Bhasin and Wittkofski 2002
Murray and Simon 2002; Wisnosky 2003
Johnstone and Baumgardt 2004
Johnstone, Andrus and Danielson 2006

And that’s just from Wikipedia.

@BwanaBob

Leave it to people to create a third form when there are already two acceptable ones.
a) The car needs “to be” washed.
b) The car needs “washing”.
Why on Earth would a third option even be conceived (except through ignorance?)

Because we prefer the completed aspect, not the continual one. So it’s not that we’re dropping “to be”. We’re choosing option B, but using the finished, completed version “washed” instead of the continual, ongoing “washing”.

It’s Scotch-Irish for the most part. And it’s not all verbs. Usually just like, need, and *want *

See this thread.

[SlowMindThinking]

@DSeid

Well I knew it was Pittsburghese from my wife, who would tell the story of her first year college roommate and friend who spoke that way, and when my wife made of her always responded with “Yeah, and which one of us placed out of Freshman English?”

My wife is my source that it comes from the German influence. Anyone with any more definitive source for its origins? Not that I don’t trust my wife …

My wife is PA Dutch, as in she is the first generation in her family to speak English as their primary tongue. She always picked on me for saying things like “My car needs washed.” My dad is of Scott/Scott-Irish descent from the Pittsburgh area, so undoubtedly I got it from him. (And yes, to “red up a room” means to get it ready.

My recollection is that while it didn’t raise an eyebrow in the Philly area, it did in the area of the PA Dutch, and around Pittsburgh it was common. So, I can’t believe it came from the PA Dutch.

[yabob]

@Chronos

While the second-person-plural pronoun is pronounced (approximately) “yinz”, it’s spelled “you’uns”, a contraction of “you ones”. And in my experience, it’s more common in the rural areas of western PA than in Pittsburgh itself.

Hmmm. I grew up in rural Western PA, and didn’t hear it. I’d say it’s more “burghese” along with a number of other constructs that didn’t make it out into the sticks, at least into the rural NW corner I was familiar with (Crawford, Venango, Warren, Forest counties). The dropped “to be” thing was common, though. We didn’t stick an “r” in “wash”, either. That’s something I always associated with the coal country in the south of the state.

[Bad_Astronaut]

@njtt

All your base are belong to us

This is what I thought of when I read the topic as well! I thought it was going to be some kind of engrish (Japanese-English) thing.

As such, I second magellan01’s warning that this type of expression sounds very un-smart to a lot of people who are not familiar with it.

[Contrapuntal]

What does red up, redd up, or rett up mean?

[yabob]

@Contrapuntal

What does red up, redd up, or rett up mean?

As noted, probably from “made ready”. It simply means to straighten or tidy something up. “This room needs redd up” simply means you should pick up all the junk strewn around the place. Another “burghese” thing I didn’t hear in NW PA.

[robardin]

I’ve never heard of this idiom, it sounds very strange to me.

To my ear (or eye, since I technically I still haven’t heard this idiom, only read of it), it’s more in the line of using “might could” for a suggestion (“I was thinking, Mary Lou, iffin we might could go see a movie on Friday night, together like?”).

I wouldn’t go so far as to say users of such constructions are “stupid”, but it’s definitely something that’s in the realm of “regional dialect”. And stereotypes being what they are, any area’s regionalisms may be perceived as backwards, obnoxious or irritating to those from somewhere else, relative to the stereotyped perceptions of whatever the people from that region are.

[DSeid]

@SlowMindThinking

My wife is PA Dutch, as in she is the first generation in her family to speak English as their primary tongue. She always picked on me for saying things like “My car needs washed.” My dad is of Scott/Scott-Irish descent from the Pittsburgh area, so undoubtedly I got it from him. (And yes, to “red up a room” means to get it ready.

My recollection is that while it didn’t raise an eyebrow in the Philly area, it did in the area of the PA Dutch, and around Pittsburgh it was common. So, I can’t believe it came from the PA Dutch.

Thanks … I’ll think I’ll keep it quiet from my wife.

Anybody with some linguistic cite (other than the consensus) that it is actually from Scot/Scot-Irish origins?

[hibernicus]

@ruadh

Really? I’m surprised at that, I hear it often. As Xylo suggests it does seem to be somewhat more common in the North but I hear it from southerners sometimes too.

If I heard someone say “the dog needs fed” or “my hair needs cut”, I think I’d notice because it would sound so odd. I’ve been trying to imagine it in a northern accent but it doesn’t help! The closest I can think of is someone saying “I need my hair cut”. But now that I’m aware of it I’ll listen out.

[Chronos]

I should say that I don’t think “you’uns” is particularly common anywhere; I think it’s just associated with Pittsburgh and the surrounding area because it’s almost unheard-of everywhere else. The “r” sound in “wash” (and other aspects of the same accent) is a bit more common in western PA, but still far from universal, and the “needs washed” construction is, so far as I can tell, perfectly natural over a relatively large area roughly centered on Pittsburgh.

[yabob]

The Western PA section of the wiki Midland American English article said something I found interesting about Erie, BTW:

Erie, Pennsylvania was described as being in the Northern dialect region in the first half of the 20th century. However, unlike other cities in the North, Erie underwent the caught-cot merger and not the Northern Cities Vowel Shift, and now Erie has at least as much in common linguistically with the rest of Western Pennsylvania as with the North. For this reason, Erie has been described as the only major city to change its affiliation from the North to the Midland.

We got sick of sounding like Buffalo, and decided to sound like Pittsburgh?

Wiki on Pittsburgh English confirms the Scots-Irish origin of “like, need, or want + past participle”, and reminded me of another odd usage I remember:

“positive” anymore adv. these days; nowadays (Montgomery 1989; McElhinny 1999; Montgomery 1999)

Example: “It seems I always wear these shoes anymore.”

Further explanation: While in Standard English anymore must be used as a negative polarity item (NPI), some speakers in Pittsburgh and throughout the Midland area do not have this restriction. When not used as an NPI, anymore means something like “these days.”

Geographic Distribution: Midlands (Montgomery 1989).

Origins: Likely Scots-Irish (Montgomery 1999).

[Cazzle]

“_____ needs _____ed”, and “anymore” used in place of “nowadays” form the backbone of my proposal to nuke the US from orbit (it’s the only way to be sure).

[Patty_O_Furniture]

This thread needs closed.

[flodnak]

I grew up in eastern Pennsylvania (Lancaster County, to be precise) and heard constructions like “The floor needs washed” fairly often. This was something that was used across all generations, unlike certain other features of the dialect which were more common among older people.

Language changes, dialects form. If you’re looking for a logical reason for this, you’re going to be disappointed. Language differences just are and they don’t need to justify themselves.

Oh, yeah, and it’s definitely redd up, which has nothing to do with the word “ready”. It comes from Scottish dialects and is a cognate with, for instance, the Norwegian word rydde.

[Nathan_S]

Where I grew up (south - central PA), that “the car needs washed” kind of construction was very common. I never realized it was anything out of the ordinary before reading this thread.

[DSeid]

@flodnak

… Language changes, dialects form. If you’re looking for a logical reason for this, you’re going to be disappointed. Language differences just are and they don’t need to justify themselves.

Oh, yeah, and it’s definitely redd up, which has nothing to do with the word “ready”. It comes from Scottish dialects and is a cognate with, for instance, the Norwegian word rydde.

Very interesting on the origins of “redd up” …

As to your belief that changes “just happen” - some linguists who study the evolution of languages may beg to differ. We do not always understand it, but that is another story.

[Orange_Skinner]

“Needs washed” is commonplace in NE Ohio, too, to the degree that I’d say it is interchangeable with the two other forms (i.e., needs to be washed, needs washing). I’m fairly well-educated and consider myself to have an above-average grip on proper English grammar and punctuation, but it took me a few minutes to understand the wrongness of this “needs washed” construction (I hope because I’ve been so exposed to it). It doesn’t sound strange to me when spoken, nor look strange to me when written, and I’m sure I’ve said it myself (I’ll have to stop that, especially now that I’m in Michigan where it apparently isn’t used, especially by the “educated,” among whom I associate). “Warshed” (as well as “bathed,” pronounced with a short a sound, and “striped,” pronounced to rhyme with “biped” as opposed to “wiped)” are looked down on as being an uneducated way of speaking by most North Eastern Ohioans, and typically associated with people from extremely rural areas. “Warshed” makes me cringe, and I have never said it except as an example in a discussion of its incorrectness/annoyingness.

I have nothing further to offer about the origin, but I would second what **Chessic Sense **about it’s functionality; it does offer a distinction between a desire to be engaging in the act (the car needs washing), as opposed to a desire to have the act done and over with. However, I disagree in that I think this is encompassed with “needs to be washed” (I don’t see how this one implies the ongoing act of washing needing to be done); the only benefit I can see “needs washed” to have over"needs to be washed" is that it’s shorter.

To slightly hijack the thread, is anyone familiar with this one, which is also from NE Ohio/PA (though perhaps not exclusively):

My mom drives bus for the elementary school.
I have to mow lawn before it rains.

Some of our super-rural neighbors would occasionally whip out that construction, and they could not be convinced that they sounded like a cliched Native American in a bad Western. Usually when they’d say things this way, it was in reference to some kind of profession/duty, and proper definite/indefinite articles were otherwise used normally.

Oh! I’ve also heard you-uns is as yous guys, or yous (which I think actually makes a lot of sense when trying to distinguish between one person from a group and the whole group, like the French tu [singluar] and vous [plural or formal]). Sounds kind of hillbilly-ish, but has some functionality.

[Minnie_Luna]

Born in Canada, moved to Central PA when I was about 12.

It was a very common thing to hear in Central PA. I was taught the Queen’s English in Canada and had to learn all kinds of new phrases when I moved to PA, not to mention the letter “zee”.

[pancakes3]

slippy? careful it’s slippy outside? or is my buddy from the 412 just messing with me?

[SlowMindThinking]

@Orange_Skinner

Oh! I’ve also heard you-uns is as yous guys, or yous (which I think actually makes a lot of sense when trying to distinguish between one person from a group and the whole group, like the French tu [singluar] and vous [plural or formal]). Sounds kind of hillbilly-ish, but has some functionality.

I always thought “yous” came from Allentown.