more TV lingo

[victor steinbok]

There's a good 20 years of evolution between our respective
experiences--not sure if it's more than that. It's not that we have
dealt with different people, but the people we dealt with like were of
predominantly our own age. My experience, as you well know by now,
essentially started in college, which would have been in the
mid-1980s. At that time, I've heard both versions--even both versions
from people from the NYC area. But I've heard much more of progressive
and plural than non-progressive and singular. And, since then, I've
heard almost entirely the plural.

VS-)

On Mon, Apr 18, 2011 at 8:43 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:
> FWIW, I've mostly heard people cited as shitting their bricks one at
> a time, OED-style.  I've only ever heard it in the present or bare
> stem form, as above, never "s/he shat a brick (when...)".  The
> progressive, as in "He must be shitting a brick now" seems a bit
> marginal but the perfect, with "shit" as the participle, is OK:
> "Anyone would have shit a brick".
>
> LH

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org