It may be strictly regional. I wouldn’t know…I don’t study individual regional dialectic language.
But around here and in most of the Southwest USA (which is the region in which I have spent most of my life), people routinely say things like, “Yeah, I shoulda went to the gas station when it was $1.34” Or, “I knew I shoulda did that first.”
When I hear these phrases come out of people’s mouths, it hurts my ears in much the same way a train whistle makes a dog howl.(and I am not just talking about the rednecks/hillbillies/“whatever-your-regional-term-is” down the road…I have heard people from the professional segment of the community use this same appalling language).
Why doesn’t this combination of tenses sound wrong to people?
It would be the same as saying, “If only he had was a good student…” instead of, “If only he had been a good student…”
And then, if you tell any of these people (like my SO, for example, who constantly mixes verb tenses like this) what the right word would be, they tell you that it doesn’t sound right to say it correctly.
I don’t get it. How does something like this become a habit? At what point in these people’s lives did teachers and/or parents (providing they did not pass on the same habitual behavior) stop noticing if they ever did. How can these people watch the news or read articles in magazines and not notice that nowhere in that broadcast or article is any example of the way they talk?
I don’t know how this kind of thing starts, or becomes so common, but there are certainly some “localisms” around here that drive me nuts! One is when, a mother, talking about her child’s wardrobe will say, ‘I think I’ll wear that on her for Church Sunday’. Another one is something like this: ‘Do the dishes need done?’, ‘Do your breaks need checked?’. In our mall, outside the music store is a big sign that says “DOES YOUR PIANO NEED TUNED”? Well, if I had a piano, it might need to be tuned, or it might need tuning, but it most certainly does not ‘need tuned’!
Well, my big complaint is that people today say “bring” when what should be used is “take”. This is happening more and more on television. To me it is the same as the way “come” and “go” are used and damn if I haven’t started hearing “come” used instead of “go”.
Example: I’m going to bring this over to my girl friends house. (My son to me) :smack:
My girl friend asked me to bring this with me.
or
I’m taking this to my girl friend’s house.
Yes, God forbid that languages should evolve - old words taking new meanings, words being dropped/added, grammar rules being modified. I wonder what the grammarians of 1800 would say about Strunk & White?
