"Shouldn't ought"

[Jonathan Lighter]

I've known this since my 1950s NYC childhood, when (I think) it was pretty common among grade-school kids.  I stopped using it when I "grew up" (no, Erin and Grant, that wasn't "earlier this week").

JL

Lal Zimman <zimman at SFSU.EDU> wrote:
---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Lal Zimman
Subject: "Shouldn't ought"
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I was recently reading Frank Miller's noir-style graphic novel _The
Hard Goodbye_, which is in the _Sin City_ series (on which the recent
film of the same name is based). The main character, Marv, is clearly
a working-class-Catholic sort of a guy from the fictional Sin City
(which resembles both Las Vegas and Chicago by my judgement) and
frequently says that he's "not too bright". He uses a number of non-
standard constructions (like double-negation) and says at least 3-4
times, "shouldn't ought", as in, "You shouldn't ought to hit me that
way, Goldie."

I'd never heard "shouldn't ought" before, so I googled it. I got 551
hits, though a good number of these are pages of lyrics (one called
"Skinny Boy" by Robert Lamm/Chicago, for example, has the lines "And
even though you do some things you shouldn't ought to / Shouldn't
ought to / If you love your brothers love will come back to you") and
some are separated by punctuation (like "shouldn't/ought").

http://www.answers.com/topic/ought has a usage note that says "Usages
such as [...] 'She shouldn't ought to say that' are common in many
varieties of American English." Does any one know which varieties of
English this usage can be found in? Was it a more common construction
in the earlier part of the 20th century? (This would make sense since
the book is in the noir style.) I'd be interested in hearing where/
when people have heard this.

Thanks,

-Lal


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