"Shouldn't ought"

[Alice Faber]

Likewise 60s suburban New York (my parents are from NYC). I don't think
I ever "outgrew" it. At any rate, I remember confusing grad school
classmates by introducing the expression into classroom discussions of
more "conventional" double modals.

Jonathan Lighter wrote:
> 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"
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> 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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--
 =============================================================================
Alice Faber                                    faber at haskins.yale.edu
Haskins Laboratories                           tel: (203) 865-6163 x258
New Haven, CT 06511 USA                        fax (203) 865-8963