When do we want to not have it?

[Wilson Gray]

Excellent point! I would have expected,

"When do we want not to have it?"

or

"When don't we want to have it?

WTF? How in the world *do* you question a call-&-response like that?

-Wilson

On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 1:06 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: When do we want to not have it?
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> At 12:35 PM -0400 6/2/10, Charles Doyle wrote:
>>I'm passing this along from George Clay Bunch (ESOL professor at UC
>>Santa Cruz--and my sister's kid).
>>
>>Charlie
>>
>>
>>I heard the following on an audio clip on the radio, in a news story
>>about a protest against building a biomass incinerator somewhere
>>(can't remember where):
>>
>>Lead protestor rallying the group: "What do we want?"
>>
>>Group: "No incinerator!"
>>
>>Leader: "When do we want it?"
>>
>>Group: "Now!"
>>
> Hah.  I'd have thought "Ever!" in that last response would have been
> more decisive, if not necessarily grammatical.
>
> LH
>
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--
-Wilson
–––
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"––a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
–Mark Twain

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