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?

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

And my automatic thought to that was "it has more than one?", then I remembered how my English teachers tried to correct the bumpkin children's pronunciation.

Full answer: When I'm thinking about it, I use two syllables. When I'm tired, I revert to Greene Countian and say "po'm".

When I went to a Northwestern Pennsylvania school, lots of people asked if I'd grown up in England, because of my accent.