Grammar Girl's "needs done" survey

[Jonathan Lighter]

In his speech yesterday, the President of the United States observed that
much of America's infrastructure "needs rebuilt."

A Presidential first?

JL

On Wed, Sep 7, 2011 at 8:50 AM, Neal Whitman <nwhitman at ameritech.net> wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Neal Whitman <nwhitman at AMERITECH.NET>
> Subject:      Grammar Girl's "needs done" survey
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> 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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