"come with" going national?

[Mike Salovesh]

Greg Pulliam wrote:
>
> I heard "Can I come with?" today on a radio ad for Marriot
> Hotels--the ad seemed to me like it might have been for national
> distribution, but I can't be sure.  I heard it on WGN radio, Chicago.

WGN has long been a "clear channel" station.  No other radio station can
operate legally on its frequency, indicated as 720 on most radio dials.
When conditions are right, WGN can be heard clearly in most parts of the
48 contiguous states -- and, in my experience, in Mexico and Central
America as well.  What they broadcast is intended for national
consumption, and needs no redistribution.

WGN's companion station, WGN-TV, is a "super station" distributed by
satellite and frequently recirculated by local cable TV services
everywhere.  (WGN-TV actually reaches more of the cable-TV audience in
Central America than CNN, despite CNN's transmissions in Spanish.)
WGN-TV's impact thus parallels the reach of WGN radio.

Despite their wide national and international audiences, the WGN
stations persist in acting as if Chicago is the center of the world.
This maintains the traditions of their original owner, Col. Robert
McCormick, long the publisher of the Chicago Tribune. (WGN was an
acronym for "World's Greatest Newspaper", which is what Col. McCormick
called the paper everybody else called "the Trib".)

I cite the narrow parochialism of both the WGN stations and the Chicago
Tribune as a caution against taking their practices as reflecting any
nation-wide tendencies.

"Come with" is a well-established item in several major varieties of
Chicago English.  Editors well inured to the practices of the Trib or
the WGN stations would be inclined to accept that usage without change,
if indeed they noticed anything unusual in the phrase.  Col. McCormick's
general theory was that God intended the whole universe to do things the
way they are done in Chicago.

-- mike salovesh                    <salovesh at niu.edu>
PEACE !!!

P.S.:  In furtherance of Barry's current concern with food and drink,
it's true that Chicago's taste clearly reflects what God would have
intended if he'd thought about two major culinary items. In their
separate genres, the Chicago-style hot dog and Chicago-style pizza are
as close as human cookery can come to divine perfection.  Only a
misguided soul given to the ultimate barbarism of putting ketchup on a
hot dog would disagree.  (That kind of ignoramus would probably spell it
"catsup", or even "catchup", anyhow.)