From the frozen desks of Saint Paul, Minnesota, comes the call for proofreaders. (via Frank Wilson, who points out that he doesn’t give “a tinker’s dam what the rest of the world thinks of my country.” But, Frank–but, Frank–if the world doesn’t respect us, we may not get the party invitations we need and they may not pass us notes at the U.N. sleepovers.)
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I can make those sacrifices.
U. N. sleepovers. Eww.
I do love the phrase, “tinker’s damn.” My grandpa used it all the time. Along with the phrase “cold as a well digger’s lunchbox.” This could be switched out with miner depending on how he was feeling. Btb, he was a coal miner so I guess he would have known.
This is terribly sexist, but we need more of those manly, craft oriented phrases.
The grammatical construction that has been bugging me lately is when someone says something “Needs done.” I’m finding it more common that the “to be” is dropped from sentences where the verb ends in -ed. The farmer says the engine “needs overhauled.” Until this week, I wrote it off to uneducated speakers. Then I saw it used in a newspaper article yesterday. I’m hoping that was an early draft posted online that was cleaned up before it hit the print edition because it needs edited.
Don’t worry, Susan. I think the men around here are comfortable with mild sexist verbiage like that. As long as no one gets vulgar, we’re okay with free speech.
I wonder if phrases like that are too old school for modern speakers. Where are similar contemporary phrases? A union job is doing as little work as possible. Pushing pixels is mundane office computer work. What else could there be? Maybe “running for office” could be a description of the co-worker who’s all talk and no work.
Greybeard, have you seen many examples of using “myself” as a subject? Have certain people done that for a while now? Lars and myself would never stoop to that level of grammatical expression.
I hear people using “myself” as a subject all the time. The tragedy is that they’re trying to speak correctly, as they understand the rules, not knowing that the more instinctive choice is, in fact, right.