"coming with" in San Francisco

[wachal robert s]

I've lived in Minnesoata and it is certainly common there.  it's a loan
translation from German or a Scandinavian language and hardly likely for
someone from SF regardless of race.

Bob Wachal

On Tue, 3 Aug 1999, Dan Goodman wrote:

> 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.
>