VERY RANDOM POLL

[conuly]

Poll #20467

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 109

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Under what circumstances, if any, is the sentence "It's too garlicky for me, the skin" valid in your dialect?

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As a spontaneous statement
25 (23.4%)

Only in response to a question such as "Why did you pick the skin off your chicken, I thought you loved that part?"
50 (46.7%)

I am familiar with this construction, but it's not valid for me
13 (12.1%)

I've heard this, but have no instinct for when it might be acceptable to other speakers
14 (13.1%)

This is never a valid construction in my dialect
18 (16.8%)

Other
12 (11.2%)

When speaking in conversation, how do you refer to William Shakespeare?

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William Shakespeare
20 (18.3%)

Shakespeare
104 (95.4%)

Will
4 (3.7%)

Bill
1 (0.9%)

The Bard
7 (6.4%)

Other
3 (2.8%)

Are you familiar with anything by Kafka other than The Metamorphosis?

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Yes
53 (49.5%)

No
47 (43.9%)

Who's Kafka?
7 (6.5%)

Since I'm watching Gargoyles all the way through, should I just recap them properly?

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Yes
52 (72.2%)

No
20 (27.8%)

Who's a good doggie? Who's a good doggie?

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Finn
25 (25.8%)

Moonpie
26 (26.8%)

ALL DOGGIES EVERYWHERE
91 (93.8%)

I went down to the bathroom, and guess what I saw?

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A praying mantis on the doorjamb!
80 (100.0%)

Comments

[stardreamer]

Re your first question, I have never used or heard anyone else use that construction. At a guess, I'd say it's a Yiddish idiom, but I haven't even heard it from my Jewish friends.

[conuly]

All oddities of NYC speech are probably Yiddishisms at the core, unless they got imported from some other immigrant group instead.

[darkoshi]

At first, the phrase seemed odd to me (skin? garlicky?), but upon thinking what it meant (oh, potato skins would make sense), and trying to think of similar phrases... "It's too hot, this weather" "It's too heavy, this hammer", it seemed totally natural, like I've heard people speak that way. I wonder if it comes from German; I can hear Germans speaking that way too in my mind. Or maybe it's just that one starts off saying "It's too ...." and then upon realizing that the other person may not know what you're talking about, you add on the last bit.

[conuly]

Chicken skin, actually.

Could you also say "It's in the kitchen, the coffee"?

[darkoshi]

That one sounds less natural. If someone is asking where the coffee is, you shouldn't need to repeat "the coffee" again. And it seems unlikely someone would spontaneously say where the coffee is, if no one has asked. With your original phrase just saying "It's too garlicky for me" is a tad ambiguous - it might be taken to mean the whole dish, so it makes sense to clarify by saying "the skin" (even if someone asked about it as in your 2nd bullet).

[siderea]

Re "other": wrestling here with the concepts of "valid" and "mine" as applied to dialects.

[conuly]

Well, I'd say idiolect but then it gets redlined. So does redlined, for that matter.

[jack]

I don't think I'd naturally say that (unless I forgot the noun and wanted to add it back in), I was unsure what you were asking until I saw some more comments. But I think I've *heard* that construction (German or Yiddish does seem like a good bet, but I don't actually know)

I'd normally say "Shakespeare" -- it's not like there's other famous Shakespeares. But if someone genuinely hadn't heard of him I'd probably use his full name. Why, do other people do something else?

I think Metamorphasis is the most famous story, but I think most people know Kafka more from "Kafkaesque" which is more from The Castle, which I know less about, except that it's very Kafkaesque

[acelightning]

As for #1, I'm violently allergic to garlic and onions, and all of their relatives. Any food that has ever been near a clove of garlic or an onion is too garlicky for me.

[moxie_man]

I've never heard that first phrase so checked other. Thinking on it further, it's like a foreign language statement translated directly into English. I hear things like that up here in Maine all the time with our large Quebecois and Acadian populations with sentences in English, but using French grammer. As this is response is pre-coffee, I can't come up with an example at the moment, partially 'cause I don't pay attention to it as much these days as I did when I was growing up as father's side of the family is Quebecois and mother's is Acadian.

[sabotabby]

Oops! I wasn't pondering the construction of the sentence so much as anyone objecting to too much garlic. It's not a thing I hear people say, or understand when they do.

Did you get pics of the praying mantis???

[topaz_eyes]

It's almost Newfoundland-like in its construction. Just have to omit the comma. (Newfoundland English, where "Throw me down the stairs my shoes" is perfectly valid.)

[steorra]

"It's too garlicky for me, the skin" sounds perfectly valid to me, but I'm having a hard time pinning down which contexts it's pragmatically appropriate to.

I might have checked both your "spontaneous statement" and "response to a question" boxes, except the "response to a question" box said "*only* in response to a question", which would have been incompatible with checking both boxes. Even apart from that, I don't know if it would be accurate.

Also the pragmatics of question-response will depend on what is or is not already highlighted/mentioned in the question.

Anyways, I'm Canadian, and it sounds like a perfectly valid sentence to me, but contexts are hard to pin down.

And it doesn't strike me as particularly foreign-language influenced, counter to some commenters above.

[conuly]

I might have checked both your "spontaneous statement" and "response to a question" boxes, except the "response to a question" box said "*only* in response to a question", which would have been incompatible with checking both boxes. Even apart from that, I don't know if it would be accurate.

Yeah, poor poll editing and then I couldn't fix it.

[conuly]

I don't know about you, but I don't habitually take my phone (or a camera) with me when I go to the bathroom.

[conuly]

I'd normally say "Shakespeare" -- it's not like there's other famous Shakespeares. But if someone genuinely hadn't heard of him I'd probably use his full name. Why, do other people do something else?

Some of us are on a first name basis with him.

[delphi]

In my family's small town, northern Canadian 'Métis Franglais' dialect, tacking the subject on at the end like that always flies. It's more commonly employed for repeating pronouns in accusative form, like, "I think it's too garlicky, me," or "She's really putting away those wings, her," or with a "that" instead of "the" as in "It's too big for me, that house," but I've definitely heard examples like yours often enough. Which makes sense, because the literal translation works fine in French.

[agoodwinsmith]

Garlic Situation - Valid construction in casual spoken conversation: people discussing their meals at a restaurant, someone saying "it's too garlicky for me" and then clarifying "the skin". There might or might not be a pause as indicated by the comma - but if there is a pause, the pause would be more like a dash. Never in written; never in spoken formal - where people wouldn't be disussing skin at all.

[dariaw]

my high school English teacher referred to him as "Shakey Jake Shakespeare." She was awesome.

[pauamma]

In my idiolect, that sentence is semantically (or is that "pragmatically") invalid, because things can't be too garlicky. :-) (But to answer your likely question, I never heard it and have no opinion about its syntactic validity.)

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

I like to call him Wild Bill.

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

If a Hawkeye in the woods...

Apparently a bear ran off with the seat...

(Sorry, I'm amazed at your icon)

My condolences on the allergy.

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

Now imagine it as a baby on a slumbering person's pillow.

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

Invalid Markup Garlic doesn't take too.

(barring allergy and religious abstainers.)

Your icon is cute.

[acelightning]

I found this picture using Google Image Search, decades ago. The only alterations I made were to crop it and re-size it to 100 to 100 pixels. When I examined it closely, it looks as if someone just took a regular toilet and painted it purple with ordinary paint. But it suited my need for an icon related to "tasteless" subjects :-)

[conuly]

:)

Agreed. Moar garlic! MOAR!

[conuly]

Sounds like!

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

"Under what circumstances, if any, is the sentence "It's too garlicky for me, the skin" valid in your dialect?"

I tickied 'Other' because what exactly does 'valid in your dialect' mean? The sentence is certainly understandable to any speaker of English, but its construction is not technically correct in 'The King's English'.

I'm not sure I actually have 'a dialect' I can call my own. I've lived too many different places and dabbled in too many languages and jargons; I speak whatever version of English best suits the company I'm in, and probably still sound like a damned pedant (oh well!)

[conuly]

Valid in your dialect means just that - this is something that you can say or hear without thinking "WRONG WRONG WRONG". Like the invariant use of the habitual be.

I would have said "idiolect", which we all have, but that would've probably required an explanation for some people.

[oloriel]

Clearly, in my dialect it would be more like "is mir zu knofelich, die Haut", but as a non-native speaker, I'd still consider it a valid construction as long as it's either understandable from context (option B) or uttered spontaneously (option A)...

As for the Swan of Avon, it really depends on who I'm talking to. If it's a formal context - talking to students, talking to people I'm not on a familiar joking level with, etc. - it's "Shakespeare". If I'm talking to friends other English lit enthusiasts in an iformal setting, it might be Stratford Bill or Will Shakespeare. When the informal group of interlocutors consists only of fellow Germans, I might be tempted to pronounce the name "in German", kinda like Schuh-kay-spay-arey, or translate it (very badly) as Willi Schüttelspeer (another variant is Schüttelbier, but that would strictly be Shakesbeer). I might also ironically speak of The Bard (TM). So really, all of the above, depending on context and content. >_>

[conuly]

(Newfoundland English, where "Throw me down the stairs my shoes" is perfectly valid.)

In my dialect, that's not.

[conuly]

It's more commonly employed for repeating pronouns in accusative form, like, "I think it's too garlicky, me," or "She's really putting away those wings, her,

Intuitively, those constructions (also found in Cajun areas) sound very different than what I'm thinking of. I'll have to ponder.

[conuly]

I prithee, I can discuss skin under all circumstances, including the very formallest ones.

[conuly]

He's not the one and only The Bard. He's the Bard of Avon. Robert Burns is the Bard of Ayrshire. You can blame the Victorians for this - they had whole lists of "Bards" of this and that place, though only two of them have stuck.

[sabotabby]

I do. The phone, not the camera. I may be weird.

[conuly]

...my bathroom!?

[oloriel]

Well, Ayrshire is a mouthful, so that's probably why only one of those two Bards (TM) managed to make it across the Manche. XD

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

The preying mantis. (Operating language too late. Though this comment with an icon up thread would bring new Mad-libs)

[agoodwinsmith]

Thou then might receive-eth fewer invitations to select events, thou might-est indeed. Or one might be celebrated as an iconoclast - it's difficult to predict these things.