My wife, her sister, and her mom (and possibly the guys in her family but I don't know; I haven't noticed them do it) say "needs _____" instead of "needs to be _____". So for example, Jess will say that the kitchen "needs cleaned" or the dishes "need done".
What's with that? Is it a common thing? Does it have a traceable origin?
Well, here's one source that's never heard of it. Kitchen needs cleaning, aye, but kitchen needs cleaned, nay.
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I think that's a central PA thing. Pretty well documented. Also reminds me a of a Belle And Sebastian lyric: "I'll send a dress to you / Because it's needing badly taken in"
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Seth: What are you making?
Evan: I'm just drilling holes. Last two weeks, **** it.
Pretty good AMan! I didn't even know that any of them were from PA... I was going to respond and say "I dunno about that". But then I went out and asked Jess if anybody in her family was from PA and she said that her maternal grandmother is from there and that her mom was born there (Shippensburg, which is pretty central!).
[This message was deleted at the request of the original poster]
Great, now you've got me thinking about what's going on syntactically here. This squib seems like a good starting point:
http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/~gawron/ling795/readings/tenny/psych_verbs.pdf
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Seth: What are you making?
Evan: I'm just drilling holes. Last two weeks, **** it.
While we're here, is this Watson Jeopardy computer thing up your alley, Aman? And if so, is it blowing your mind?
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Ocarinakid