"bring Route 40"

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

On Aug 28, 2008, at 6:18 PM, Douglas Wilson wrote:

> Here ...
>
> http://www.freelists.org/archives/seniortech/11-2006/msg00022.html
>
> ... is "take the bus or bring the bus home".
>
> Note "home".
>
> "Bring" is an option exactly where "come" might be used (instead of
> "go"), I think.
>
> Where is this from? I don't know, but at a guess maybe it's from
> wherever somebody says "subway" for a grass strip between the street
> and
> sidewalk.

yes, this is in a discussion of "local words", in a contribution from
"Bernie Tomasso":

.....
How about the subway where in some parts of NY you would park your
car? (The grass between the street and the sidewalk)
Do you take the bus or bring the bus home?
Do you eat a coney or a hot dog?
Are there kettles or pots and pans in your house and what is the
difference?
Is the nearest town 'pert near' five miles away?
.....

> I've lived quite a few years in western PA, also quite a few in WI,
> etc., and I don't recognize the odd idiom.

i had four years in central illinois and four in central ohio, and it
was new to me.

from Rebecca Starr (26 August), who first reported the usage:

"got this tip originally from a friend who just heard it from a native
of western Indiana, who says that she uses it all the time and didn't
realize it wasn't standard. The examples we've found seem to center
around Indiana, but there are some from elsewhere (possibly written by
people from Indiana, though). Meanwhile, my friend who gave me the tip
lived in Indiana for a long time and says that she's never heard this
usage before today."

> Maybe it's not recorded (much) because it's very recent, or because
> it's
> very infrequent (Google prevalence doesn't seem high compared to other
> seemingly unusual variants).

as to frequency: it's hard to do searches, and in addition, the idiom/
construction even with "take" is not very frequent to start with.

arnold

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