"coming with" in San Francisco

[Dan Goodman]

I was reading a mystery set in San Francisco, and came across the
dialog "I'm coming with."  Which was not what I would expect a
middle-class African-American woman in San Francisco to say.  The
author has lived and worked in San Francisco, and seems to be
generally a careful observer.

Recently, I learned that the author was born in Minnesota.  I suspect
he grew up with "coming with", and didn't remember that it's not as
natural to San Franciscans as it is to him.

Writers who set their fiction in their adopted homes probably make
such mistakes _much_ more often than I've noticed.

Dan Goodman
dsgood at visi.com
http://www.visi.com/~dsgood/index.html
Whatever you wish for me, may you have twice as much.