I saw a post on a hobby forum unrelated to writing that included two items of potential interest to wordsmiths and observers of the gradual demise of the English language. The post: 1. In the first paragraph, his use of "needing cleaned" -- I see that fairly frequently, but I don't know when it became commonplace to omit the "to be" that should go in there. Has anyone else noticed this? I see it mostly on Internet discussion forums. 2. Should be "My interest has been piqued by ..." Another example of people who hear something and never bother to learn how to spell it -- or use it correctly.
Bad usage of the English language is everywhere, but that has always been true. I wouldn't worry about it.
Nor is it always bad. Regional dialects are as real and worthy as the standardised English we mangle our daily speech into when writing. Just think of how many words the Celts, Norse, Normans and Romans would hear and say “they can’t even speak properly. Look what they’ve done with our language”. If language can have a demise, then it would have to have a rise and a peak. I’d be interested in knowing why any bastardised and mongrel version of it would be seen as the apex. I bloody love language, I do.
Needing cleaned If there's a consistent and widespread usage, and there's a logic to it (dropping a redundant auxiliary verb to speed up communication), and it's on the rise... it might be safer to think of it as a natural morphological shift. But I wonder if the OP might be mistaken about the shift's starting point. Wouldn't it be that they started with "needing cleaning" but disliked the repeated -ing on the gerund. Depending how the -ed is intoned, the speakers might have wanted a different ending to mark the gerund, and plumped for -ed (the past participle rather than the normal present participle), if so this might be an apophony. My interest has peaked This one looks like English trying to purge a Frenchism and replace it with a more familiar verb of its own. It doesn't seem to be that widespread from what I can see on Google.
Perhaps someone can clarify this one for me. "It's my first time doing this." I would say "It's the first time I have done this." The above construction annoys me no end because it feels wrong - and yet it seems to be quite commonplace.
Well, the meaning would be rather different than "piqued". "My interest has peaked" is a perfectly legitimate thing to say, meaning "I am as interested in this as I am ever going to be, and I am going to get less interested in it from now on."
People in Appalachia talk like that all the time regardless of intelligence or educational level. "The engine needs fixed." "Nah, the fuel filter just needs replaced." etc. Drove me crazy when I lived down there but as far as I can tell it started out as a regional thing and is slowly spreading.
I had taken the OP to be saying that they are using "My interest has peaked" intransitively with interest as the subject to mean almost the same thing as "[something] has piqued my interest" transitively with interest as the object. So not that they are as interested as they will ever be, but that their interest has been bitten / got going.
It's difficult to find analogous constructions because of the temporal participle, but I'd suggest this one if your dialect has it:- A(i) It's my first time skiing = A(ii) It's the first time I have skied B(i) I had a hard time skiing = B(ii) ??? In A(i) and B(i), I think we must take "skiing" to be operating adjectivally on a time word, rather than being attracted to the speaker. In A(i) time is the subject, but in B(i) I is - but is it this difference that leaves B(ii) empty? I had a hard time(skiing) vs. Skiing, I had a hard time A minute thinking is better than a lifetime regretting We can swap time for year, day, hour etc. I don't think this is unique to time words, but there are other constructions where the participle doesn't become adjectival and there is an equivalent to A(ii). Another interesting thing about A(ii) is that it acquires a perfect sense - when A(i) doesn't refer to a completed action. I wonder if A(ii) is an idiom from a Germanic(?) precursor language that didn't like adjectival participles and instead wants a nominalized verb: "It is the first time I have the skiing". The "have" in A(ii) is then for possession of the nominal, rather than an auxiliary verb to form the perfect tense.
But it seems alive and well to me? I think he actually did mean to write what he did; his interest peaked, meaning that it had reached its high point and had was beginning to ebb.
I've heard the equivalent of needs cleaned and variants so often on UK cop shows that I thought it was accepted there. Now that I think of it, I've also heard it in Appalachia. So now I know that I should work it in if ever writing dialogue in one of those settings. The one with peaked looks to me like he thought he was cleaning up bad usage -- that he simply had no knowledge of the word piqued, and didn't want to use was peaked or has been peaked. Certainly it's all too common to spell piqued wrong that way. Its even more common than misspelling cite, site, or sight. I've no objection whatsoever to This is my first time doing this, This is my first time in the city, and similar constructs. Certainly they're tonally different from their longer versions, but if anything I would've thought they're more common in speech than saying it all out. The form with doing appears from a quick-and-dirty Ngrams to have entered print around 1975, and it's not that much less common in print than the other. Change the verbs to swimming and swum, and Ngrams finds zero occurrences with swum.
It's a dialect. The theory is that it comes from the Scots language and is transplanted in certain areas in America. It's grammatically wrong for English, but it sure would be smart to know when to use it in certain voices. It's a good catch to notice it. The peaked/piqued thing (in my opinion) is one of those dumb corrections people do to sound intelligent. It's kind of like "mute point," which you'll hear every now and then instead of "moot point." Moot and piqued aren't day-to-day words, so they're dismissed for more familiar choices. Sometimes the speaker shapes the sentence around the word they know and fixes the sentence. For example: "He decided to be mute on that point." That makes perfect sense but when you see that word combination you know there's a misunderstanding seeding the sentence. Same thing for "my interest has peaked." It makes sense but it's built on a crooked foundation. It's right up there with "begs the question," which is a phrase misused almost 100% of the time. (It's supposed to deal with failed logical assumptions.) If you hear someone say this and they could have said "raises the question," then they screwed up. Professionals do this on the news. It's embarrassing for them. Now you'll get these constructions: "I begged him with questions until he told me the truth." Crooked foundations, again. Reminds me of when Mr. Bean wrecked that painting. I mean, he did repair the damage with what he knew, but if you have an artistic eye, you can tell something's not quite right.
In my next fantasy work, I shall include people who are blessed with a natural aptitude for magic. They will be said to be "to the mana born".
Apparently we've lost the war on that one, and are expected to come out of our caves, take off the uniform, and rejoin society. And put our weapons away. I choose to use it not at all instead of getting with the program. But I do still point it out in critique notes. I'm waiting for the knock on the door any day, and a stint in re-education camp. I will not be surprised if you're already familiar with Bryan Garner's thoughts on the expression in Garner’s Modern American Usage or one of his other reference books.
