"for to" in DARE

[Wilson Gray]

On Sun, Aug 9, 2009 at 1:17 PM, Arnold Zwicky <zwicky at stanford.edu> wrote:

> judgments about which people use a
> variant, how many of them use it, and how often they use it are often
> undependable.

In fact, youneverknow. I managed to be black and live black in various
parts of the country - Texas, Missouri, California, both Northern and
Southern, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania - for almost three-quarters of a
century without *ever* hearing *anyone* except John say,

"I BIN PP."

I was familiar only with

"I BIN PrP."

Yet, I believed that he must have heard it somewhere. "You can't make
this stuff up," as they say. Finally, a month or two ago, I heard
someone on Jerry Springer say,

"I BIN told you that! I been told you that since Christmas!"

It's taken nearly 75 years, but I no longer simply have to take John's
word for it. I've actually heard it with my own two ears. And
precisely in a semantic environment wherein *my* grammar begs, pleads,
screams, and cries for

"... BIN telling you that! ... been _telling_ you that _since_ Christmas!"

You can't beat that with a sludge hammer.
--
-Wilson
–––
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"––a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
–Mark Twain

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