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.

doesn't carry any particular sense of urgency

Not so much urgent as an expectation that it should be done pretty soon. In my family, if you said, "the cat needs to be fed," a smartaleck would say, "Why, yes, he does. Every creature needs to be fed sometime." To which Mother would say, "The cat needs fed now," and a smart child says, "I'll go take care of that."

Yikes! I confess to lurking here from time to time because I have such respect for the writing talent in these parts. Much of my day is spent writing, work writing, technical writing, tutorials, help files, documentation, and the biggest bore of them all, business correspondence. I know not the ways of fiction writing.

I am the most literate person in the office, and I am the person who bridges the technical and non-technical types. These comunication abilities led me to be selected to write a newsletter to be sent to customers and linked on our web sites.

My purpose in stopping by the thread is to beg for some feedback on my first 3 newsletters. These were written in the last couple weeks between doing other things and I haven’t been able to persuade anyone here to read them. My mother and sister liked them! If I could put them aside for a couple weeks and look at them fresh I would probably have many changes, but pressure is on me to get them out. I don’t want to send out the first one until I have 4 done since it is supposed to be one a month. (I haven’t started the 4th one yet)

The subject matter of each is somewhat technical, but they are intended to be read by non-technical readers. They are also intended to be lighthearted, perhaps even humorous. My company creates software for document management. The bulk of our customers are physicians or bankers. They are 500ish words each. My mailing list is not composed of fussy readers. Mostly office administrators that aren’t looking for brilliant prose.

I am not at all sensitive and am well aware that this is not my greatest talent, but I am pleased enough with my initial efforts to courageously ask for feedback. Be brutal if this is needed; be supportive if possible. I apologize in advance if this is an inappropriate imposition and intrusion into the thread, but I don’t want to start sending these out to people on my mailing list if they are not ready. (and now I’m feeling a little queasy and worried they are pathetic)

Thank you in advance for your comments, whether minor picks or major error finds.

Linky 1
Linky 2
Linky 3

Gulp

And my automatic thought to that was "it has more than one?"

Heh. I think I was in college before I found that out. I went to high school in Maryland, so I must have *heard* people saying poh-em for years, but the discovery they weren't all just prissy was very startling to me.

Not so much urgent as an expectation that it should be done pretty soon.

Yeah, that I can see. (And I would probably change around the sentence structure if that wasn't the case -- e.g., "We need to fix the air conditioner" means it's November and we should remember this at some point in the next six months, whereas "The air conditioner needs fixed" means "Get out the Yellow Pages, before I melt.")