Grammar Girl's "needs done" survey

Neal Whitman nwhitman at AMERITECH.NET
Wed Sep 7 12:50:39 UTC 2011


Yesterday, Grammar Girl asked her Facebook friends to tell her where they
hear "needs done", and there are 500-some comments so far. For the price of
putting up with superfluous comments about how it's driving them crazy, or
how they correct someone (or are corrected) on it, or providing just-so
explanations on the reason for this laziness (e.g. because it's used by
people who do a lot of manual labor and they're in a hurry), you'll find
some interesting geographic data points. For example, there's one from
Arkansas, which I see isn't yetted pinpointed in the Yale Grammar Diversity
project map. (I left a comment linking to the YGDP URL, but no one seems to
have taken notice.) But be careful; a few have asked, "Does 'needs washing'
count?", so it's just possible some of the data points are false positives
like this.
http://www.facebook.com/GrammarGirl

Neal

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org



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