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A Quick Question for the Ricochet Grammarians
Many of my Ohioan peers and coworkers omit the verb “to be” in passive constructions, especially when assigning tasks. They’ll say, “These shirts need folded,” rather than, “These shirts need to be folded,” or, “These shirts need folding.”
Today, I asked my Latin professor about this. She speculated that the form may be a “Germanism,” a bit like the infamous question, “Come with?” (In the 19th century, central Ohio harbored a sizable German population.) According to my German-major roommate, though, the German language, like English, permits only the infinitive (“needs to be folded”) and gerund (“needs folding”) in this situation.
Where, then, did “need folded” (and its variants) originate? Why would “to be” disappear from the passive? Is it merely linguistic laziness? Or an example of language’s natural tendency to simplify?
Published in General
Much better.
My wife is from Columbus and has a college degree, but still omits the “to be” as noted in the original post. It’s a regionalism that seems to survive formal education. As someone with prescriptivist tendencies, I guess it should annoy me, but the older I get the more I appreciate regionalisms and regional accents. Our country is slowly being stripped of these things via T.V. and the Internet.
(BTW, did anyone see the woman from Alabama in the Ken Burns WWII documentary? She spoke with a gorgeous and cultivated Alabama accent that I’d bet is probably all but dead now. “War” was a two-syllable word: “woe-uh.” Fantastic.)
I’m from Arizona (Phoenix), and the only regionalism I can think of is that I use the term “arcadia door” for a sliding glass door. I’ve never heard anyone from anywhere else use that term. For those still in Phoenix: do people still use that term?
But that’s still the dreaded passive voice!
When i saw this i had to think about where i just heard the term “arcadia door” the other day. it was in an episode of Forensic Files, about a crime committed at a home in …Phoenix. I live in So CA and had not heard that term before. The crime was in 1966, but the woman who used it wrote it in a document in the 90s.
How about, Canada deports Surian refugee seeker to US.