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Forum URL: http://www.eyrie-productions.com/Forum/dcboard.cgi
Forum Name: Undocumented Features General
Topic ID: 2280
Message ID: 33
#33, RE: Forward Momentum
Posted by The Wanderer on Nov-11-07 at 08:51 AM
In response to message #25
>>"What do you, have her on a Miraculon drip?"
>>
>>Surely, "What, do you..."?
>
>This must be a regionalism people outside my neck of the woods aren't
>familiar with, because someone attempts to "correct" it every time I
>use it. I assure you, in conversational use the comma is right where
>I put it.
>
>(SEE ALSO: "What are you, a comedian?")

I hail from variously Indiana, Vermont, New Mexico, New York and Maryland, and am quite familiar with "What are you, ..." forms, but as far as I recall I have never before encountered "What do you, ...". The former seem natural to me, the latter do not.

I suspect that the difference lies in the fact that "What are you?" is a perfectly valid sentence on its own, but to my experience "What do you? would defintely not be.

Not claiming you're necessarily wrong - if you say this is standard usage in your neck of the woods, I have no reason to doubt you, strange though it seems - just explaining why it might be reasonable for people to think the usage is wrong.


(Somewhat more on the overall topic: I agree with many others that this is another very good piece, and with several others that the cliffhanger is just painful - the more so because the only idea we have of how long it is likely to be before the next segment is "probably quite a while".

And I'm going to have to read it again, because I just realized that I forgot to extract the songlist into a separate file while going through the first time... <grin>)