[177/366] 88F / 31C

[cosmolinguist]

I was gonna say I'm the only person who enjoyed today's weather, but then there's Andrew's mom who called to thank him for her birthday present and since I answered the phone told me that the only reason she wasn't working outside is that she couldn't see her laptop screen in the bright sunshine, and my friend Sarah who said on Facebook this afternoon "Everyone complaining about the weather needs their mammal license revoking." Heh. I took the opportunity to tell her that Andrew had just been complaining about it being so humid "the air is like walking through soup," but I'd been feeling perfectly comfortable so I looked up the relative humidity and it was 30%.

After Minnesota summers this seems like such a dry heat to me! And no mosquitos!. My mom still can't get over the fact that our house doesn't have screens on the windows and doors; no need to keep bugs out. (Well she did also ask me once "Don't birds fly in?!" and when I said "no, why would birds want to fly into houses?" she didn't have an answer.)

Comments

[shewhostaples]

We did have a bird fly into the conservatory a few weeks ago. It flew out again once I started closing the blinds, though, so it had clearly only come in by mistake.

[cosmolinguist]

I suppose a conservatory would be an easier place to make that mistake, since it's a room mostly made of glass. :)

[steorra]

"needs their mammal license revoking."

Is "revoking" a typo for "revoked" or can I get excited here as a linguist about a construction that I haven't heard before? It looks almost opposite to the needs washed construction.

[cosmolinguist]

It's not a typo, it's a really common passive construction here. They even teach it to English learners.

[steorra]

The examples there look to me like a slightly different construction, and one I'm much more used to.

They look like they're equivalent to "Their mammal license needs revoking", not "They need their mammal license revoking".

"Their mammal license needs revoking" sounds totally normal to me.
The alternative "Their mammal license needs revoked" would be the nonstandard "needs washed" construction.

"They need their mammal license revoking" sounds unfamiliar.
The alternative "They need their mammal license revoked" is, I believe, standard.

[wolfpurplemoon]

I'm not even slightly a linguist but it sounds normal to me (even if it applies to me cos I can *not* cope with this heat :P)

[steorra]

Interesting, thanks! It's always fun to stumble across dialectal differences in grammar that I wasn't previously aware of.

[theandrewhickey]

I suspect this is a UK/US difference. "They need their mammal license revoked" sounds fine to me, but is not the way I would naturally phrase it. "They need their mammal license revoking" sounds absolutely natural. It seems along the same lines as, for example, "you need your head looking at".

[steorra]

Really interesting, thanks.
(I also would say "you need your head looked at" rather than "... looking at")

(Also, I'm Canadian, not American, but Canadian usage does mostly align closer with US usage than with UK usage.)

[cosmolinguist]

They look like they're equivalent to "Their mammal license needs revoking", not "They need their mammal license revoking".

Oh so you're talking about the existence or position of the object ("their mammal license") (side note: this is such a silly sentence to use for syntactic analysis!) and not the -ing vs. -ed endings on the verb?

Whether the verb is transitive or not doesn't affect this passivizing -- like Andrew's example below, "they need their head looking at" works just the same as the ones I linked to like "the room needs tidying."

I don't say it either (I'd say "their mammal license needs to be revoked") but I hear it so much now I don't even notice it so I'm glad I could inadvertently introduce you to a new thing!

[ewt]

I definitely want screens. I even got some that fit to the bottom of sash windows; but that's only two of the windows.

[miss_newham]

Ha ha! A pigeon came into my flat once, but it just got really confused about what to do next and I had to carefully shepherd it out again.

[cosmolinguist]

Poor pigeon. :) I'm sure it does happen, but she seemed to think it'd be a constant problem and they'd be doing it on purpose. What does a bird want with my house anyway?

[miss_newham]

Only a bird that's really very keen on the Beach Boys...

[finding_helena]

Back in college, some friends were living in a house off-campus and a bat got inside. We had the dickens of a time getting it to vacate the premises and go back out!

[cosmolinguist]

My parents get bats in their house very occasionally. Once one flew into my bedroom when I was sleeping and fell, injured or sick or something, into the garbage can and just stayed there until morning! But once or twice my parents have had to chase one out, and my mom really freaks out at the idea of a bat getting caught in her hair even though that doesn't happen, so it's exciting.

[jesse_the_k]

30% humidity sounds so deliciously cool.

Are public buildings routinely air conditioned in the UK? (I have a youngling memory of movie theaters boasting of “refrigeration” on their marquees.)

[cosmolinguist]

Not as a matter of course. Movie theaters are, yeah, and a few restaurants on the Curry Mile used to advertise air conditioning (maybe still do, I don't go that way as much any more :) ). Andrew is really missing not having "go to the movies" as a way to get a few hours of air conditioning this summer, actually.

[silveradept]

There clearly is regional variance in what qualifies as humid, as my Great Lakes upbringing says it isn't humid unless you're soaking your shirt just trying to do your normal routine, or if you express the wish that it would just hurry up and rain already, since it clearly wants to. But that definition, despite (because?) it raining a lot more, Pacific Liberalland is usually less humid on average by my perception.