drive by drabble

I know others have the right to the vigils. Beyond husband, he is son and brother. But I prefer to sit alone. My strength is a silent thing, like mountains. I want no Virgil on my journey, no one I must prop up, no one for whom I have to put on a happy face, who cannot cope with the cold stillness which gets me through this.

To escape Inferno you must go into its heart. In the end, everyone makes that trip alone. I prefer to have no companions who need lied to.

connie, that's really powerful, but there's a word missing, or off:

I prefer to have no companions who need lied to.

who need lied to.

That stumbled me, too, but I think it's a regional dialect issue. I'd say "need lying to", but I think "need lied to" is the preferred usage in parts of the Midwest, for instance.

It is?

Cool! Noted. Sorry, connie - I hadn't come across that before.

With people I've known who've used both, "This needs fixed" is more time-urgent than "This needs fixing." It's an economical way of saying "This should have been fixed long before now." Similarly for Connie's "need lied to"; I read it as more strongly stated than I would read "need lying to," or even "need to be lied to."

Edited to add: Connie, that's a heartbreaker. Lovely stuff.

Connie, that's a wonderful drabble. All of the drabbles are making me teary eyed today.

but I think it's a regional dialect issue.

Huh. I never think I've got a dialect, but every now and then it just pops up. It never occurred to me to put "lying to" or "to be lied to" in that sentence. I learned the language in Western Pennsylvania, which is sort of the borderlands of the Midwest, I guess. Appalachia/Midwest. In my head, though, now that I think about it, it has more of a hill country feel to it. How intriguing. My brain was in a very formal, precise place, but my word choices are not "proper" English.

As Karl said, it does have the feel of immediacy, on the lines of "You need fed" as a summation of a situation which requires an action to resolve. It feels like the action will definitely occur in the very near future--the speaker is about to turn around and pull stuff off the shelves and start cooking--rather than a statement of possibility.

Or, in other words, words are fun.

I love stuff like that. And thinking about it, I have come across it, in a slightly different form; reading a history of Bonnie and Clyde, someone wrote from Texas that "the Laws (meaning the cops, not the written rules) died 'em real good."

Which is a gorgeous phrase. It has this immediacy to it.

I wonder if it's trackable back to a particular section of England. Was it Samuel Johnson who set up the verb agreement rules?

I wonder if it's trackable back to a particular section of England.

Not sure. Dialects have always seemed to me to have odd, unpredictable patterns of development. I mean, it could be going down one road, and three Lithuanian or whatever families move in andmaster the local language slightly differently, and a whole new lingo is born, or a subset of one.