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.

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

The place I read about it (and I wish I had cites, but I don't) says it's most common in places with a lot of German immigrants.

it's most common in places with a lot of German immigrants.

Well, that's the other major ancestry group for my part of the world, so it's not surprising.

I have relatives that would say that, so I barely noticed.

It's a Pittsburgh/Western Pa. thing, definitely. My family is from there, and I still say "the clothes need washed" or "the cats need fed" if I'm not thinking about it. In my usage, it doesn't carry any particular sense of urgency -- it just signals the speaker is too lazy to say the "to be."

connie, do you also pronounce poem as as one syllable?