Wednesday, February 06, 2008

Addendum

Nico has snagged the full text of Rebecca Mead's profile and posted it on his blog for your reading enjoyment...

2 comments:

  1. This sentence left me gaping: "Muhly, who is twenty-six, had a violin concerto that needed writing, but he also had a pot of Bolognese sauce that needed cooking." Since when is the "needed [gerund]" locution acceptable to the New Yorker? (That question can be read gramatically and regionally, and, yes, I am a total grammatical snob on this one, due to regional issues...my kids were FORBIDDEN to use that phrase when we lived in its originary region.)

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  2. Post email conversation with Jenny, I must make myself look less like an idiot by noting that the offending regional locution is in fact "needs COOKED," and that I believe resisting this locution for eight years left me sensitive to all permutations of needing and verbing, hence the outraged response to what is probably a completely reasonable turn of phrase that now looks thoroughly odd to me.

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