Reality-show mother to child: "Don't be having any more falls!"

Wilson Gray hwgray at GMAIL.COM
Mon Nov 5 19:10:38 UTC 2012


 It strikes me as, somehow, strange, in a way that I'm unable to
articulate. Because you don't tell a child not to fall in the future,
as though falling is some dumb thing that a child might foolishly
*decide* to do? It also sounds British-y. Humpty-Dumpty "had a fall,"
but he was an English egg.

It's also another nail in the coffin of my former, erroneous belief
that "don't be VERBing" is Southern and BE - and maybe Jewish - as
opposed to standard "don't VERB."
--
-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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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org



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