"They was trying to hand me out a flyer."

[Damien Hall]

George said:

'Is "hand me out" really common in England?'

Yes - and in the rest of the UK (Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland) as well.  Well, I'd say 'hand out a flyer to me' would be the majority variant, but 'hand me out a flyer' is a pretty common minority variant, maybe commoner in production in the North of England than elsewhere, and I don't think it would be thought of as especially unusual by any native speaker of BrE that heard it.

So, sentences like the following made-up ones are completely acceptable to me (Standard Southern British English, brought up in London, but with lots of family in the North):

'The doctor wrote me out a prescription.'

'I'm waiting for him to send me that back' ( = 'send back that [thing] to me')

etc etc.

There has been some work done on the acceptability of these sentences, I think by Bill Haddican (then of the University of York, which is in the North of England, of course; now of CUNY Queens) - he would have done it exactly because Americans can't usually produce sentences like that (and he is American).  I'll ask him whether he has any results from it.

Damien

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Damien Hall

University of Kent (UK)
Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, 'Towards a New Linguistic Atlas of France'

English Language and Linguistics, School of European Culture and Languages

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